Huge Hit in Traffic

Has anyone else seen a hug hit in traffic to their site? Mine (All Things Moto! Web Forums) was getting ~3000 uniques per day, and as of yesterday I lost 2500 (3700 down to 1200) in one day, and today isn't looking any better. oh This isn't good.

As a result of this my AdSense has taken a hug hit -- Down 75%.

Before that I was doing well.

Anyone else seeing this? Anyone have any information on what or why this might be happening? I'm at a complete loss as to what or why this might be happening.

Hello Jonathan ,

Did you change anything within your settings lately or faced downtime ?

It may be a temporary glitch , i advise you not to change anything at all and wait at least for a week to see if this is temporary or not.

Thanks for the reply.

No, I haven't changed anything in a long time. Not in the last few months (2-3) at least.

I am working on moving from one dedicated server to another, but I've not moved that site yet.. I'm a bit baffled.

I think you have good advise though as I should wait and see what happens.

Dang this is nerve racking.

Oh, and I've not seeing the same hit on my other sites. They are all staying steady (bit of growth if anything).

Oh, and I have had some down time, but nothing out of the ordinary (server reboots, mysql upgrade and a crashed mysql table last week) but that's it.

Is it all Google traffic you lost? Check some of your top traffic delivering search terms and see if you've been removed or slipped down the rankings significantly.

Actually, yes, it appears to be search traffic. Not sure if it's only google or not -- not sure how to tell.

I haven't kept much of an eye on how many pages were listed in google, but it seems that I've lost over half or more. I'm down to 21,700. I'm pretty sure it used to be 50-60 thousand -- though honestly, I can't accurately remember.

And yes, some of my top search terms that were on the first page aren't even there now.

Actually, found it.

On Monday I had 3158 search referrals from Google. Yesterday I had 778 is all.

Wow... Google obviously owns me...

It must be more than Google though, because you said you were down by 2,500 right?

I noticed you even have Google site links. I can't see why you would be penalized. Did you see any new competing sites that have bumped you, taking over higher rankings they did not hold before?

Have you purchased or sold any links?

Originally Posted by Joe Ward

It must be more than Google though, because you said you were down by 2,500 right?

Correct -- And for some reason I don't get much love from any other SE (maybe 5% of all search traffic is from anyone other than google).

Monday:

• Search Engines 3,306.00 (87.65%)
• Direct Traffic 308.00 (8.17%)
• Referring Sites 158.00 (4.19%)

Tuesday:

• Search Engines 3,299.00 (87.39%)
• Direct Traffic 309.00 (8.19%)
• Referring Sites 167.00 (4.42%)

Wednesday:

• Search Engines 893.00 (71.73%)
• Direct Traffic 223.00 (17.91%)
• Referring Sites 129.00 (10.36%)

From that 3 day snap shot, direct traffic is down a little but I think that's more just normal up and down movement than a trend.

Originally Posted by Joe Ward

I noticed you even have Google site links. I can't see why you would be penalized. Did you see any new competing sites that have bumped you, taking over higher rankings they did not hold before?

Have you purchased or sold any links?

Honestly I'm not sure who is now higher? I haven't kept my finger on the finer details of the site since it's been up and running quite well for a long time.

I've actually never purchased or sold any links period.

Just confirming. You have no error messages listed in your Google Webmaster Tools, and you also did not make any minor little changes such as adding the tag cloud on your homepage, or minor stuff such as that?

I do actually have errors in webmaster tools, but I always have at least some errors.

Web crawl errors

Last updated Apr 20, 2009
Errors for URLs in Sitemaps 20 Details »
HTTP errors 0 --
Not found 49 Details »
URLs not followed 1 Details »
URLs restricted by robots.txt 7,722 Details »
URLs timed out 0 --
Unreachable URLs 0 --

I have not changed anything on my front page in quite a while. I upgraded my front page on 2/11/2009 at which time my photogallery stopped showing up (the recent pictures) and I also removed an advertising slot from the main column. That all happened at that time. So 2 1/2 months ago is the last time I changed anything.

Oh, and I did change to using some of the suggestions from Briansol's guide a while back -- but that's been 6 months ago or more (that's what the 7,722 in robots.txt is all about).

What are the details messages for the robots.txt part?

What changes did you make to the homepage other than removing the galleries & ad slot?

If you check your analytics, were the galleries you removed getting a significant amount of traffic? Perhaps traffic has dropped to the gallery pages primarily.

it contains links to showpost (no longer exists), and lists all the URL's that are restricted (no .php and .html).

I have attached the zipped xls if you want to look at it. But I don't see anything that it's blocking that it shouldn't be blocking.

I believe I changed the number of active threads the portal displays at that time as well. I think I went from 30 to 40. Nothing else other than the ad slot and gallery pictures (it was a random photo section).

I didn't actually remove the galleries, just a section on the portal page that showed 5 random images from the gallery (I didn't actually remove it, it just stopped working and I've not taken the time to fix it yet). The gallery's according to analytics only see's 6000 pageviews a month. But the Gallery still exists, just not the 5 random images.

Sorry, I hope I'm answering your questions. I'm trying to remember everything and anything that might have changed.