Google referrals question

I've noticed that after I moved to a dedicated server I have more pages indexed, but the percentage of visitors dropped off from >50% to only ~30% referred from google

Any ideas why this would be ? I'm seeing quite a drop in the analytics

any input is much appreciatied

Has another referral source gone up significantly?

Originally Posted by Joe Ward

Has another referral source gone up significantly?

No, the other engines didn't budge. All the other engines are actually completely insignificant. When looking at SE traffic, google accounts for 90%.

It is likely a coincidence. Did you have any significant competitors emerge that may have disrupted your positioning?

Nope, same old same old. The only thing that changed was the dedicated server. Had few issues with it. Crashed few times, so the site wasn't fully accessible at times, but the quirks were worked out within a few days things normalized

To add to the weirdness, my site had about 16,000 indexed pages before, now it has 37,300 yet # of visitors from google dropped quite a bit

Well - the downtime can cause impact, however, if your indexed page count has increased, you certainly would expect to see at least a small increase in traffic.

We have seen a few reports now of admins who moved to a dedicated server and saw a decline in referrals. I have not been able to find anything that would cause a decline because of this.

Which of your sites?

it does happen.

If you are down when google tries to index you, it stops indexing you. it then tries to read all the current pages it has. obviously, it can't read them, so it pushes those pages to supplimental results.
over time, they will come back once google sees that the urls work again.

That's really weird. You'd think that google would come right back. I see google bots access my site and everything appears to be a OK, but if you look at the graph, it sucks and I'm getting quite concerned

The first dip on the site was a change in the .htaccess file that was suggested by my hosting company. It completely blocked google and google started dropping my pages. Once I realized I removed the .htaccess lines and things picked right up virtually immediately.

I just can't figure out the latest decline.

Green line marks the time I moved to the dedicated server

My Site

EDIT: I think this is also the time that I moved to the new vbseo

Seems that google referrals are slowly climbing back up. now I'm at about 43% so it's a good sign. My indexed pages have also gone up. Hopefully things will correct themselves shortly

yep, serps take time to re-generate. it's not an instant process.