Imagine 60% of your traffic goes missing one day and most of that is because Google had a bug with their algorithm.
One day you are getting a lot of traffic, paying your bills through ad dollars, and helping users find the content they need and then the next day, it is all gone. Gone not because of something you did but because of a weird glitch with Google's algorithm.
That is what happened to the owner of indianguitartabs.com.
He reported he dropped from 15,000 users to 5,000 users, with a 66% drop in traffic almost all because of Google.
And get this, Google admitted it was their fault.
Pierre Far, a Googler, said in the Google Webmaster Help forums:
I reached out to a team internally and they identified an algorithm that is inadvertently negatively impacting your site and causing the traffic drop. They're working on a fix which hopefully will be deployed soon.
The webmaster reported the issue on the 27th, Pierre from Google responded on the 29th. Today is the 31st and there has yet to be a confirmed change in Google to fix the bug.
This is not the first time this happened and Google admitted to a bug with an individual site. Last time this happened, it took months to resolve. I hope that is not the case this time, but I wouldn't be too confident in seeing a quick fix for a single site. A shame but the reality.
Forum discussion atGoogle Webmaster Help.
