vBSEO suddenly decreased numbers...?!?!

I have a problem,

When I first installed vBSEO, I noticed a significant increase in numbers, etc. Then, as soon as April 1st hit, it was like a night & day difference. My adsense (for example) went from $15/day to $1 or $2/day. I haven't touched any settings with SEO or my forums, so I'm not sure what would cause this...

Any ideas what happened? I'm not good at setting up SEO to begin with, so I have no idea how to check what or how to do what to improve anything when it comes to that field. Any help would be great please.

Thank you

Originally Posted by DEADBOLT

Any ideas what happened? I'm not good at setting up SEO to begin with, so I have no idea how to check what or how to do what to improve anything when it comes to that field. Any help would be great please.

Hi Rani,

This is to be expected, as the Search Engines discover that all the 'noise' ("fluff") URLs that standard vBulletin contains, are mostly gone, consolidating your content into a 'One URL per Resource' model.

As things level off, the usual experience is an increase in SE traffic to those unique URLs, rather than being spread amongst many URLs for that resource/page.

Check that you haven't been infected and someone is robbing your traffic:
Security issue

I've noticed great fluctuations in traffic and Google page position the last few days and I think it's the Google Caffeine update which was rumored to hit on 4/1.

Thank you for your help and reply. I did check to see If I was hacked, and the answer is no. I searched every keyword I could think that could link me to my site, and they all went directly to my website.. no other links popped up (thankfully). I will, however, reinstall the vBSEO xml file just to be on the safe side.

My passwords are set to expire every 60 days... it's annoying, but I know it's better than way.

As for the sudden decrease.. will that change or adjust itself?

I wish I knew a company or a person that can setup my SEO correctly... even If I had to pay for it to be setup right, rather than goin thru this nightmare and not knowing how to do jack.

Originally Posted by DEADBOLT

Thank you for your help and reply. I did check to see If I was hacked, and the answer is no. I searched every keyword I could think that could link me to my site, and they all went directly to my website.. no other links popped up (thankfully). I will, however, reinstall the vBSEO xml file just to be on the safe side.

My passwords are set to expire every 60 days... it's annoying, but I know it's better than way.

As for the sudden decrease.. will that change or adjust itself?

I wish I knew a company or a person that can setup my SEO correctly... even If I had to pay for it to be setup right, rather than goin thru this nightmare and not knowing how to do jack.

The way you need to check is with a new browser with all cookies deleted. Then check. If you have cookies showing you search the site and got to it from a SE before you were hacked, there is a good possibility it wouldn't show up b/c it only occurs on the first hit from the search engine (so all your new visitors would be redirected).

Secondly, I've noticed the same thing with revenue. It seems all ad companies are on low inventory right now. I'm really hoping that things pick up at the end of this month and all of next month. So this has nothing to do with your SEO...unless it's your traffic that has totally decreased. Which then you should be checking your analytics data to figure out where it's going wrong.

Originally Posted by jbartle

The way you need to check is with a new browser with all cookies deleted. Then check. If you have cookies showing you search the site and got to it from a SE before you were hacked, there is a good possibility it wouldn't show up b/c it only occurs on the first hit from the search engine (so all your new visitors would be redirected).

Secondly, I've noticed the same thing with revenue. It seems all ad companies are on low inventory right now. I'm really hoping that things pick up at the end of this month and all of next month. So this has nothing to do with your SEO...unless it's your traffic that has totally decreased. Which then you should be checking your analytics data to figure out where it's going wrong.

I did clear out all cookies before searching for anything. I even used 3 different computers at work with all cookies cleared, and still everything goes back to my site... no redirects, etc.

As for the traffic, i'm not really familiar with what's good traffic and what's bad, but i did find this diagram in my hosting summary file:

We need to see the daily visitor trends from a few days in march and few days in april.

Here ya go:

March 2010


April 2010:

Wish I could help you more...you need to install a better analytics program...like google analytics.