Forum Moderators: DixonJones
Even when we were increasing traffic in the past, the bookmarks and direct entries would never fluctuate more than between 32 and 45% of traffic.
Why so sudden ? How do we find the reasons for this drop ?
[edited by: Whitey at 3:13 am (utc) on Mar. 26, 2008]
This is usually due to one or several of your previous pages being particularly popular, but now not available.
Have a look in your log files to see if there is a corresponding rise in 404 errors - that will be the clue.
What you need to do is to go through all the urls on your OLD site and 301 them to the nearest equivalent new page. That works, but there is a tendency for Google to go for a period with both URLS indexed. Not that this is your problem. The problem is that the previously bookmark pages are now going to dead links.
One other thing - if you are using a log file analyser instead of a javascript one, then it is POSSIBLE that all the old direct entries and bookmarks were actually people calling up an image on your site (from their own page) and not actually seeing your site at all. By taking down the image, they at least get a broken image on their own sites, but you lose the illusory stats.
Dixon.
A couple of things that have come to light. We previously used awstats and i believe that bookmarks & referrals are greatly inflated due to their method of recording.
We will continue to use this when we overcome install problems in a .NET environment rather than PERL.
The next thing is that our new stats package has recorded a drop in the same over the cross over period from old to new site , but a much lower drop.
At this stage we'll have to analyse the logs as you say and compare what's been happening.
