Help! My Website Is in an SEO Depression – Traffic Crashed, Briefly Recovered, Then Crashed Again
Hello everyone,
I run a small travel business from a small country in East Asia. My website operates in what you could call a "gray-area" niche, focusing on Japan's nightlife.
I'm feeling quite lost right now, so I wanted to humbly ask for advice from those of you with more SEO experience. Even the smallest hint or suggestion would mean a lot to me.
Since launching the site in March this year, traffic had been growing steadily. Then, on June 21, it suddenly collapsed. Around July 10, I saw a brief recovery for about two days, but immediately afterward the traffic dropped sharply again.
I did not use AI to generate my articles. I only used AI for research, gathering statistics, organizing information, and fact-checking. The actual content was written by me, and I'm genuinely confident in its quality.
What confuses me the most is that several of my most important keywords disappeared almost overnight. At the same time, some other keywords are still ranking #1 in both Korea and Japan. It's only a handful of keywords that vanished, but unfortunately they're the ones that matter the most to my business.
After the drop, I stopped publishing new articles. Instead, I've focused on improving my existing content by expanding the information, adding original photos that I personally took, strengthening internal links, and making the pages more useful. Unfortunately, none of these efforts have made a noticeable difference.
I don't believe this is a manual action, a technical issue, or a complete spam penalty. If it were, I would expect the entire site to be affected. Instead, only a few critical keywords disappeared almost instantly while the rest of the site continues to perform normally.
Has anyone experienced something similar? If you were in my position, what would you do next? I've managed many websites over the years, but this is the first time I've encountered a situation like this, and honestly, I'm at a loss.
Any advice or insights would be sincerely appreciated.
Thank you very much for taking the time to read my post.
Posted Jul 27, 2026, 7:10 AM UTC