[Help] A Sharp Decrease in Traffic & Earnings

Hi,

I'm dead

My forum was generating about 3000 uniques from last November. 85% of them where organic traffic from Google. But this new year was dreadful to me. The traffic keeps decreasing from the first week 7 now it's about 800 uniques.

My google index didn't decreased. But traffic is not coming. Earnings from adsense also pathetic.

The big changes in December was:

1. We shifted the forum to a new shared host. Then we bought a unique ip for it.

2. Upgraded vBSEO to v3 Beta6 (Now gonna upgrade to v Beta8).

I don't know what happened. Can anybody please shed some lights.?

url: TechTalkz.com Community - Technology, Computers & Internet!

Who was the new hosting provider? I suppose it is possible that some blackhat activities have been launched from the same box you are sharing, or you are using a recycled IP that was flagged.

However, that might be a little too far ahead.

Did you experience any downtime during your transition from one account to the next?

Hi Joe,

Thanks for the Quick response.

Who was the new hosting provider?

The host is Steadfast.net .

I suppose it is possible that some blackhat activities have been launched

That's the reason why i switched to a deidcated ip. But the idea of a flagged recycled ip is new t me. I'll check it.

Did you experience any downtime during your transition from one account to the next?

Yeah. there was about 8 hrs downtime. Is it affect my rankings?

Well, normally I would not expect 8 hours downtime to be that detrimental. However, if you were very unluckly, it might have been 8 hours where GoogleBot has you scheduled for heavy crawling activity. This *could* possibility have let to you losing some ground.

Check your error logs to ensure that nothing is wrong with your new configuration.

Did you prune any of your old content or change your forum display preferences?

Check your error logs to ensure that nothing is wrong with your new configuration.

Actually i'm switching back to my old host now. ie. Just files. DB will be still in current server. Will this remote DB access cause any performance isses?

Did you prune any of your old content or change your forum display preferences?

I've reorganized my forum structure. Almost all forums changed their roots & some of them are merged. But will it affect as vBSEO should 301 all these?

The database hosted externally will not cause any performance issues related to vBSEO. You may find that it's query performance is not as fast as having the database hosted locally on the same server however.

What changes did you make to the forum roots?

What changes did you make to the forum roots?

I have renamed several categories, Moved some forums to new categories, Merged a few forums, Deleted some categories etc. But all threads are still there.

I've psoted it in theadminzone. Here is a reply i got.

I have also seen a sharp decrease in 'Guests', whether spiders or actual guests.

Before the vBSEO upgrade a week ago... we saw 1000 "guests" on average. Right now it is 384, and it's been consistently under 500. It peaked briefly right after installation of vBSEO to 1499... I noticed there is duplicated content on Google too when searching thread titles (lists two URLs, with threadcount number as well as vBSEO thread name).

I realize Alexa rating is inaccurate, but we've decreased over 100k spots (from 180k to 295k).

It's exactly what happened to me.

Originally Posted by Hemanth

Hi,

I'm dead

My forum was generating about 3000 uniques from last November. 85% of them where organic traffic from Google. But this new year was dreadful to me. The traffic keeps decreasing from the first week 7 now it's about 800 uniques.

My google index didn't decreased. But traffic is not coming. Earnings from adsense also pathetic.

The big changes in December was:

1. We shifted the forum to a new shared host. Then we bought a unique ip for it.

2. Upgraded vBSEO to v3 Beta6 (Now gonna upgrade to v Beta8).

I don't know what happened. Can anybody please shed some lights.?

url: TechTalkz.com Community - Technology, Computers & Internet!

I think I'm having the same problem as you do...

I've just upgraded to Beta 8 & Switched back to the old shared ip. Let's see what'll happen.

Can anybody from vBSEO Team comment on this?

Whenever you move a thread or merge forums, vBSEO will automatically set up the necessary 301 redirects.

I'll be interested in seeing what happens when you move the site back to your old IP.

It is possible that Google saw a large influx of new 301 redirects and didn't like it.

We have seen this in some cases on sites when they first switch to vBSEO because of all the new URLs. This is why we strongly recommend that once you install vBSEO, that you not change the URL format after your initial configuration.

It is possible that Google saw a large influx of new 301 redirects and didn't like it.

That may be the reason. But i didn't changed teh thread dispaly formats. But change in categories results in such a penality is terrible. :(

If this is the case, it's the frequency of large changes that could trigger something. Fortunately, the solution is good. Just keep your current settings in place. Avoid making any other forum changes for the time being and it should correct itself.

You know whats strange. After the Yahoo update, they dropped us off of the map! Google also hasn't been very kind to us and we are down about -20 spots per keyword.

*bangs head on desk* - Search engines are going to give me a heart attack!

Yahoo made up about 70% of our search engine traffic!

- Compu