Traffic down by 80%

My forum was out ranking some of the official sites for thier own domain names and thier main keywords and in the last 24 hours Its all gone and my pages are burried deep on google for each and every keyword I have been targeting.

My traffic has gone down by almost 80% in the last 24 hours :( any one else seeing any change in serps recently?

Page rank after the recent update is still 4 and a lot of inner pages are pr4 aswell including all the archive pages also comming to pr4 now.

I havent done any changes or changed the host and everything has been the same for the last 6 months with no changes atall.Any one got any clue what could have gone wrong? Traffic down from 2500 uniques to 400 now :(

Any suggestions on what could have gone wrong would be much appreciated.

No idea. No fluctuations in referrals to our site though. I'd give it a while before changing anything at all, otherwise, you'd be adding more variables to the issue.

This again is proof to me that the visual PR is completely worthless. My PR lost 1point and our traffic is higher than ever. My advice is you stop looking at the green bar and start working on getting more content on your site and get some more friends/partners to link to your main pages. It's all you really can do to get the visitors up.

Will wait for a few days :(

Google has added a secondary calculation to rank pages which has affected many sites. It will probably come back up. Don't panic.

PR has nothing to do with SERPS other than the fact that Google will crawl higher PR sites pages deeper.

"PR has nothing to do with SERPS"

Of course it does. The more links pointing to a domain the higher that domain will rank in the serps. I noticed now our site does rank lower in the serps, so I hope this is temporary...

I should clarify. This tool bar page rank export has nothing to do with any current changes in your SERPS.

Toolbar PageRank is a strong indication of Google discovering LinkBacks to your site. An improvement will typically occur after installation of vBSEO as link consistency is achieved.

Toolbar PR is updated once every 3-4 months. However, actual PageRank values used in ranking calculations are updated more frequently for use in the algorithms.

While a high visible PageRank is correlated to positive SEO factors, an increase or decrease does not necessarily go hand in hand with a likewise increase/decrease in traffic. The reason for this is that multiple other factors are included in the calculation.

One of more dominating factors, or small changes in a large group of factors will typically result in a noticeable traffic change.

Toolbar PageRank does have one non-SEO related advantage in that it may influence a webpage's authority with a Web visitor when they land at your site. Many user many come to associate higher authority for pages achieving higher toolbar PageRank, thereby influencing them to stay longer, click deeper into your forum, and perhaps register and become a participating member, etc.

This is a very good read based on many opinions on what drives search engine ranking for a page.

SEOmoz | Google Search Engine Ranking Factors

To hell with page rank :( I just need my traffic back :(

My traffic is down to 300 unique visitors now as opposed to 2500-3500 unique visitors a couple of days back :(

Do you think google is discounting the links I have built? The are mainly links from blog posts and stron directories and I dont have any blogroll links or footer links.
I guess google has tweaked thier alog to discount a particular type of link. My guess is that they have nailed upon directory links this time.

I doubt it could be blog post links as it would kill the effect of natural links aswell as they cant really make out between sponsored posts and real ones except where blogger specifically states that this is a sponsored post.

Could google be killing the benefit of links from blog posts with sponsered written in it? In that case a few grands I spent on it have gone down the drain :(

Any one else got burnt? or is it site specific for me...

Were all the locations you created links, similarly themed to your site?

Originally Posted by Code Monkey

I should clarify. This tool bar page rank export has nothing to do with any current changes in your SERPS.

I don't think this update was just the toolbar pr export, the traffic went down at the same time the pr is lost. Either they changed the algorythm to change the value of some backlinks, or something else happened. On some of the serps my site was on top , after this update it's not even on the first 5 pages. And they still haven't updated their directory

They haven't even updated half of their datacenters so far from what I can tell.

I still show the same PR on my toolbar for my sites, and all other sites I visit, but when I check datacenters, its is about 50/50 right now.

Wonder if this is going to be another month long process?

Originally Posted by Joe Ward

Were all the locations you created links, similarly themed to your site?

All except one wordpress theme which I sponsored stupidly and is spreding like a virus every where and blogs using that theme are a mix of niches but I dont see that making any difference.

I have just realised that I lost one site wide link on a PR5 home page site with 17000+ pages indexed on google... I lose it on the 23rd and now I have got it back up again so I am hoping this would reverse the effect to some extent :(

I have got a few new PR6 links on a competetors site and they are as relevant as a link could get.


*** I dont know how many of you have noticed but google search results are in a mess for the last few days. I am seeing a site at NO1 for a particular keyword with no relation to the word atall and the page doesnt even have the word on the page (not even hidden) I checked the incomming links aswell and didint find even a single link with the keyword as anchor... So dont know whats going on ... I guess google gods have lost the battle with the devil this time :(

Just keep an eye on it. If they're doing a algorithm upgrade, then it will fluctuate significantly as they test it live. If the results are extremely poor, it may event result in a rollback (that is, they'll remove the update and restore previous search results).