My website lost 50% of organic traffic recently

Selected answers from the Dumb SEO Questions Facebook & G+ community.

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  Nebojsa Djukic: Hey, guys! Here's a quick question - I have a WP website with a silly plugin that ;auto create internal links. There was ten or so internal links in each blog post. Words and even numbers were randomly hyperlinked. Random word A is hyperlinked to random blog post B.
  
  The website lost 50% of organic traffic recently.  ;Do you think that such internal links may cause some issues?
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  Dustin Watson: Yes i think internal linking can cause this to happen. Best advice, do this kind of link tactic yourself instead of letting little robots to do it. Better quality on the eyes
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  Rajeshwar Reddy: I think you lost it to UX. Nobody likes an hyperlink on random text. It does not help gaining user trust as many spam sites use the same method. Internal linking is useful only if the other blog is relevant to the context. So take down the plugin. As Dustin suggested, do it yourself.
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  PromozSEO: Internal links have 2 different benefits.
  1. It helps search engines to re-crawl and re-index relevant pages.
  2. It helps users to browse through relevant pages.
  Automation is always a risk unless you monitor and change them accordingly.
  It's a clear sign that irrelevant internal links from pages not helping your users and Google is smart enough to catch what you are doing.
  Better do these manually to get best results.
  In SEO there are no Shortcuts...Period
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  Martino Mosna: it may be seen as a spam tactic, so yes it's a cause you cannot exclude. Did the traffic drop suddenly or gradually in time? Have you excluded already other possible causes (such as unwanted 40Xs or 50Xs)?
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  London SEO Consultants: As +PromozSEO said, relevance counts but a part of this metric is time on -site and bounce rates. If your visitors have been clicking through the links and leaving due to going to a page of no interest, this will affect your rankings as the search engine view this as your site not giving the end user what they want. Having random links all over the place can mess with the linkjuice flow and mess with say, a decent silo structure.
  
  So in summary, as the others have said, a carefully thought out manual approach will beat automation every time.
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  Nebojsa Djukic: Thanks! I installed the plugin with the goal to improve bounce rate. It's removed now, let's wait to see if the website will recover. ;