Google giveth, and Google taketh away.

When you focus on growth and achieve a consistent level of revenue, it's hard to imagine your business ever slowing down. After slaving away to build a predictable foundation for your fledgling hustle, how could the floor ever fall out so long as you continue to toil?

Well, I'm here to tell you: it can. Imagine my shock upon logging in to google analytics one morning to discover my site's average traffic mysteriously dropped from 200 organic visitors per day to 0.

Initially I brushed it off as a reporting error. When the disturbing trend continued, I reasoned that it must be a momentary blip that would sort itself out soon. By the third day, I was in a full-fledged panic. My business appeared murdered in the crib, long before it ever got a chance to walk or run.

In hindsight that was the moment it all clicked for me: relying purely on traffic/revenue from organic search is an inherently precarious position. Google's algorithms change all the time. Competing sites produce new content that might outrank yours. Search volumes for your best keywords can always decline.

As I dove deeper into analytics to diagnose my woes, I noticed a massive uptick in direct traffic at the exact same moment as the drop in organic visitors. Exactly 500 visits to one article per day for three days straight. All exhibiting 0 minutes spent on page and a 100% bounce rate. These visits were distributed evenly throughout the day and evenly across 5 cities. The consistency was too uniform to be real-human visitors, so I concluded it had to be from a bot. And given the timing, the bloody thing must also be to blame for tanking my rankings!

I racked my brain, contacted everyone in my network with SEO chops, and scoured the web for answers. Could a stupid bot really have depleted my domain authority over night? How could I take the bot down? Did Google manually penalize my site for a third party's unkosher (i.e. spammy / automated) tactics? Would my site ever recover?

6 days passed with still no solution in sight. I was beginning to come to terms with the fact that we'd probably never regain organic traffic. We'd had a good run, but the party was over. I started to write my site's obit on failory.com when suddenly...

... organic traffic was back. Without explanation and strong as ever! OMFG HALLELUJAH!!

In Search Console, Google displayed a note about a server outage that created a known reporting error, which impacted rankings across thousands of sites -- finvsfin.com included. It felt like we had been brought back to life, Jon Snow from Game of Thrones style.

I'm happy to report that our organic traffic has steadily increased ever since. The site fully regained its footing on Google, but with the decline still so fresh, I can't help but think about diversifying traffic sources. I've started investing more in referrals and started to test paid ads. While SEO is cheap, it's highly unpredictable. "Easy come, easy go", as they say.

I hope my experience helps you question your own sources of traffic and the risk you run with over-relying on a single channel. And if you ever need help diagnosing a sharp drop in traffic, don't hesitate to reach out.

#fyi