We hear lots of questions about site architecture issues and traffic drops, so it was a pleasure to talk about it in greater detail at SMX London and I'd like to highlight some key concepts from my presentation here. First off, let's gain a better understanding of drops in traffic, and then we'll take a look at site design and architecture issues.

Understanding drops in traffic

As you know, fluctuations in search results happen all the time; the web is constantly evolving and so is our index. Improvements in our ability to understand our users' interests and queries also often lead to differences in how our algorithms select and rank pages. We realize, however, that such changes might be confusing and sometimes foster misconceptions, so we'd like to address a couple of these myths head-on.

Myth number 1: Duplicate content causes drops in traffic!

Webmasters often wonder if the duplicates on their site can have a negative effect on their site's traffic. As mentioned in our guidelines, unless this duplication is intended to manipulate Google and/or users, the duplication is not a violation of our Webmaster Guidelines. The second part of my presentation illustrates in greater detail how to deal with duplicate content using canonicalization.

Myth number 2: Affiliate programs cause drops in traffic!

Original and compelling content is crucial for a good user experience. If your website participates in affiliate programs, it's essential to consider whether the same content is available in many other places on the web. Affiliate sites with little or no original and compelling content are not likely to rank well in Google search results, but including affiliate links within the context of original and compelling content isn't in itself the sort of thing that leads to traffic drops.

For more information visit http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/