Going viral and resulting links cause ranking drop?

[Darth]

I have a news site that has been going steadily for some time. 3 weeks ago, a story went viral (100% organically), was picked up by all the other sites covering my niche as well as some mainstream media.

I was like, "sweet, this should increase my authority and ranking, eventually".

Anyway, fast forward a week or two and traffic has basically been cut in half. LOL. Nothing else changed, and as I said the site was very stable prior to the viral post.

Has anyone encountered this? I can't think of any explanation. I mean surely Google is smart enough to realise this wasn't some kind of manipulation, but it did gain a ton of dofollow very high DA links quickly. The domain I use for this site already has a ton of links, but this was an extremely significant number and quality of links for it to acquire in a very short amount of time. Maybe it triggered something?

I trust Google will figure it out eventually, but curious as to what you all make of it.

 

[secretagentdad]

yeah you tank more often then you don't. Especially recently.
I've had a couple of sites do that as far back as 2014.
If you don't recover you can 301 and it usually at least starts not penalized for a month.
Have reacted to it happening again by 301ing again and had it stick.
No idea how its works, results are inconsistent.

Id give it like 100 days before going crazy.

 

[Ryuzaki]

Tis but a bounce, I'd reckon. Usually it's just the page itself that receives the links that bounces. I've not seen an entire site bounce if one page received a ton of links, but I can imagine if, as you say, it's an extremely significant amount of links and page rank coming through, that it could happen. Especially as the page rank flows around.

It could be a recalculation being needed too. This is all spitball theories but you could imagine a scenario where you crossed some threshold where you may become a trusted authority. But before that calculation runs, they better hold you back a bit to make sure, lest they embarrass themselves by letting spam rank for a while.

Did you do some double checking about what pages lost traffic? Is it a handful or evenly spread across the site? Could you have lost some specific, important rankings at that time that could be unrelated to the virality?

Regardless, I would do nothing but continue on as normal. Assuming nothing unrelated happened, I'm confident it'll all come back and you'll soar over time as these links settle in and boost your authority.

 

[Hanuman]

One explanation I can think of is that a lot of people coming in from these links didn't engage as your regular readers do - so Google sees that your site is seeing lower engagement and so is not worth the top spots.

I'd advise giving it some time. Once everything is back to normal and Google sees that engagement is back to normal, they might give you your spots back.