my website has dropped traffic by 2,000 a day

You’ve tagged this topic “wordpress seo” and well, that’s not this place.

Have you considered asking on Google’s forums instead?

https://support.google.com/webmasters/community?hl=en

No Jan, because it is not a seo problem, I believe it is more of a technical problem. for example, google is having problem visiting my site. The company that were working on my site have made a complete mess, so it is something to do with the site and not seo

>> for example, google is having problem visiting my site <<

What do you see in the reports on the Google Search Console (formerly called “webmaster tools”)?

You have an XML sitemap via Yoast that looks like a good, complete sitemap but there’s a second sitemap coming up in your robots.txt file pointing at something called ‘attracta’ that is incomplete and right dated.

I wonder if Google might be missing content by going with the second site map instead of the first. The Search console should tell you something about that.

I only see 9 new posts in your RSS feed. Not all search engines pay a lot of attention to RSS but the good crawlers do look at them at times. I’d kick that up to 25 or 30 to appease any readers that might want to use those and those more adventuresome crawlers.

I normally don’t give a hoot about SEO but I kind of sense your site is running in ‘Reverse SEO’ where you’re site is putting up barriers.

In your case I’d say start with the Basics from a good SEO article and fix everything while letting the Yoast SEO plugin help you along. A couple hours of work will probably get you back on track.

Start with the robots.txt file, remove any other SEO tools but Yoast, and remove any stray sitemaps and/or references to them.

Yoast will fuss at you and guide you through a lot of this if you’ll let it.

thank you JNashHawkins. ‘attracta’ is something my hosting company said to use, and I they installed this about five weeks ago I think. The problem with the traffic started just over 14 months ago. I don’t know if my hosting company are affliated to them or not but this is the website https://www.attracta.com/ shall I remove the second sitemap, I did not even know it was there.

it is funny when you say about barriers, that is what I think is happening. my biggest mistake was hiring that seo company. the site was doing very well and then I hired them and things started to go wrong very fast and I have not been able to get back on track. instead of spending time on content, I am spending more time trying to find out what the problem is.

I did a test where I put an article on a different site and put the article on my site, and found that my site received a lot less visitors than a brand new test site.

I am wondering if they have put code in to cause problems to my site because I sacked them

I’ve heard tales where two site map sets can confuse search engines some.

I’m big on Yoast even though I care little about SEO.

Content is King!

I looked your site over a bit and didn’t see anything much to worry about.

Is it possible there’s a competitor that showed up about the time you hired the SEO guys?

I don’t know anything about Attracta so I’ll leave that choice up to you.

not sure. all I know is the site was doing very well, then we decided to hire this seo company to take us to the next level, but then they did not seem to know what they were doing although we thought we were dealing with a big company. the truth is, they bought a franchise and the work is then passed over to india.

the site started to have trouble and we started to question things, then things went bad to worse and we sacked them. then all of a sudden within a couple of days traffic dropped like a lead balloon and it has never recovered.

I am not an seo person, but it feels like there are barriers up to stop traffic. we did find a back door to the site which was quickly removed.