Decay and anomalies: two different ways a page loses traffic
A slow three-month slide and an overnight collapse look similar on a chart and need completely different responses. We run two separate checks for them.
GuidesThe SEO Rituals team11 September 20262 min read
A page losing traffic can mean two very different things, and treating them the same way wastes time in both directions.
Decay: the slow slide
Decay is a page that has been gently losing ground for months. Its clicks drift down, its average position slips from sixth to eleventh, and nothing dramatic happened on any single day.
The usual cause is that the content has aged — competitors published something fresher, or the question people ask has shifted. The fix is an afternoon of rewriting, not an emergency.
We look for decay over 84-day windows and weigh every day by how many people actually saw the page, so a day with three impressions cannot outweigh a day with three thousand. It is deliberately tuned to miss rather than cry wolf: flagging a healthy page costs you an afternoon for nothing.
Anomalies: the sudden break
An anomaly is a page or a whole site that fell off a cliff this week. Clicks across the site down by a third, a key page out of the top twenty, a batch of pages no longer getting any impressions at all.
The usual cause is something broken: a deployment that blocked crawlers, a redirect gone wrong, pages accidentally set to noindex. The fix is five minutes of checking, and it matters that you do it quickly.
We look for anomalies over 7-day windows, and this check is tuned the other way round — because the thing it catches costs a month if nobody notices.
Why one check cannot do both
A rule sensitive enough to notice an overnight deindexation would bury you in false alarms about ordinary wobble. A rule calm enough to ignore wobble would take weeks to notice a broken site. So we run both, and the anomaly check stays quiet about any page the decay check is already tracking, so you never get two alerts describing one problem.
What you see
Decay shows up in your weekly list of pages worth refreshing. Critical anomalies can also email you straight away — but only for new, critical problems, and never more than once every few days for the same issue.