| As others have said, this strikes me as a multi-faceted problem. It's possible Google devalues those sharing (even inadvertently!) GA tags in the rankings, although I don't think there's been any public proclamations from Google on that. But if that were the sole culprit, only your GA instance would reflect that. The fact that you're losing real traffic (as reflected in what the 3rd party tools are telling you) makes me think that's probably not the case/or at least the only thing that's happening. Not implementing re-directs would also definitely be a culprit. But if it's just images you failed to re-direct, that's likely not the main thing either unless you were getting a majority of your traffic from Google Images. Since this happened post-Core Update, I would want to know two things: 1. What keywords dropped and what replaced you
2. Whether the drop was site-wide or isolated to individual categories or groups of pages. Regarding #1: Was what replaced you a big, high authority publisher? Or was the content simply more comprehensive or otherwise a better match for the user's intent? Very likely could be E-E-A-T-related, in terms of the algos determining that you don't have the authority/expertise to rank for what you were ranking for previously. Investigate those possibilities first and you should be able to better map out a plan for re-gaining that traffic. |
Does the writer have access to Google Search Central? They rename this product every six minutes. It used to be Google Webmaster Tools and it’s likely called something new now. Are there any manual actions or security alerts in there??
If Google performs a manual action or picks up certain types of security problems, they will tank traffic. But they usually report to give webmasters the chance to fix it.
I’d avoid ahrefs and the like and start right with google tools.