traffic from google has dropped

[dhaliwal]

anyone seen the drop in traffic from google?
I am seeing that the traffic has dropped nearly 50 % in a day while the pages in index are the same and also the SERP have not changed that way.

I am talking about traffic of nearly 7 k from google everyday and hence its a sizable decrease.

Looking for early answers on how we could check the things

[xcomm]

The most important change at Google seems to have downgraded very big sites at 100000+. This seems what about this tread is.

Google seem think that some of this really big sites seem to delivery more quantity than quality, or?

[mmanning]

As I have never experienced anything of this realm on my end. What is the plan here?

1. Reoptimize based on new conclusions (speculation).
2. Wait for a little bit and see if this works itself out (or am I dreaming).

Thx

[walkman]

"As I have never experienced anything of this realm on my end. What is the plan here?
1. Reoptimize based on new conclusions (speculation).
2. Wait for a little bit and see if this works itself out (or am I dreaming). "

I think wait and see is the best option. First we don't know for sure what it is, second I doubt Google will be happy with the results. Watch them tone this down a bit

[patoruzu]

Don't know if it helps.

I notice some traffic drop from Google, too. My site is written in Spanish and located in Argentina.

Traffic comes from lots of regional Google sites, from every latin american country. Today I checked my referrals from the beginning of July in different Google sites (.ar, .mx, .cl, .ve, etc., etc.)

No changes: at the moment my position in the SERPs are the same for different keywords.

Explanation?

[edited by: patoruzu at 12:52 am (utc) on Aug. 9, 2004]

[euroman]

My traffic from G is the same as it was ,i check every day the SERPS i haven't noticed any big changes exept the usual up and down on the top 10 results but i have noticed a big traffic to my pages from Y and MSN ,by the way i deal with travel and tourism,i believe that industry is still undamaged and the G results in matter travel and tourism are very relevant.

[TerrCan123]

Well my site has links in all the major directories except for DMOZ including educational sites [libraries etc] so I can't see why they did this unless they are discounting educational links. Also I recently was placed in the Microsoft business directory and a few smaller directories.

Seems mighty strange...

[amard]

Instead of thinking that Google has lost traffic, it would be better to say what is bad on your site. For me, I think that I have done too much cross-linking on my travel site but it was with spam free websites :(

Maybe the drop of 90% is too much. I hope GoogleGuy will be able to tell us what was our fault like he did it in the past with hidden content for example.

[div01]

With all that's going on with Google these days, including this "quiet period", I doubt anyone from the company would make any public comments (even on non financial things like an algo change). We are on our own for a while.

[Marcia]

There never really has been anything on the algo. It's just "make sites for users not the search engines." That possibly gets harder and harder with time; after watching the search engines and "analyzing so much, certain things become automatic.

[shri]

>> make sites for users not the search engines

So true.. as long as you can figure out what the current algorithm thinks is the best for the user.

[PhraSEOlogy]

Watch them tone this down a bit

Walkman,

Lets hope so. My gut instinct says you are right - but I know that is mainly wishful thinking.

[ang0ie]

I am not sure if anyone has discussed this possibility. Could it be that the problem is regional? If the people that have had HUGE losses in traffic will post their regional (northeast, southeast, northwest, southwest), maybe the problem can be isolated?

I am in the southeast.

[Skier]

My traffic has been down now for three days. Old steady site. It's not just G that is down for me, they all are.

Interesting though, the serp positions of my basic keywords have not changed at all. They still hold the good positions that brought lots of traffic, just a few days ago.

There is little I can do but watch and wait.

[PhraSEOlogy]

Skier,

Same here.

The whole thing just appears to be odd. I dont see any real pattern to what is happening.

The good news is that its getting "slightly" better if my stats are accurate. Traffic is comming back but nowhere like it was before.

Funny, but a site ofmine thats just been indexed and has no PR is doing okay - better than sites that are 2-3 years old.

[ferfer]

Hi, here is my theory about the ALGO update...

"Home Theme Lowering Filter and Multi-Theme Authority"

Google has updated the Algo in a way that a single page of a site is now compared for a keyword with the Home Page and then with other pages, but mostly with the Home Page.

Then if the Home Page is not so relevant to that keyword, the single page is given a little less relevancy, this will lower the past position some places depending on competition not suffering from this negative effect.

But there is an extra detail...

If a site is considered a Multi-Theme Authority, this "lowering" filter is not used or used in a much lighter way, but these special big sites are calculated someway weighting the link popularity averaged with the quantity of pages.

If the site has 1000 pages, it must have a very powerful link popularity to be considered a big quality site that has no oportunity to match a single page theme with the Home Page but still being multi-authority, and more pages require more inbound links, so bigger sites in quantity of pages also require bigger link popularity to qualify.

For example if a site has 5000 pages it may require 5000 external inbound links to qualify. Those links from automatically generated pages that provided lots of links specially for old-aged sub-pages are not counting that much, or it is the fact that links to the home page are required to qualify now, I am not sure, but only real important sites seem to qualify.

This could be the reason why most single-theme sites and very big AND very important sites seem to remain where they were before the update...

[charlier]

A number of people have mentioned that they have seen a large drop in traffic but their keywords still rank well. I wonder if a few people who have seen this could have a guick look through their logs and see if there is any pattern of change in the phrases that are showing up in the referrer queries. Is the drop only for certain searches or is there a different ratio for say the sum of the top 10 devided by the total?

Charlie

[quotations]

From my vantage, it seems that keywords in domain names are really kicking butt. Anyone see this too?

Not here. My main site is kw1kw2kw3.com and it has always ranked number one for kw2 kw3 and number four for kw1 kw2 and frst page for kw1 kw3.

It has dropped to number 5 for kw2 kw3 and vanished for all other combinations.

Traffic has also dropped off quite a bit.

October 2002 1 K
November 2002 9 K
December 2002 25 K
January 2003 56 K
February 2003 28 K
March 2003 51 K
April 2003 92 K
May 2003 95 K
June 2003 76 K
July 2003 118 K
August 2003 178 K
September 2003 254 K
October 2003 408 K
November 2003 503 K
December 2003 497 K
January 2004 423 K
February 2004 333 K
March 2004 430 K
April 2004 307 K
May 2004 296 K
June 2004 243 K
July 2004 127 K
August 2004 26 K

[dhaliwal]

I wish only one thing,

Google Rolls back this update.

We will get a few days to correct the things according to new system and maybe get new external links.

and then they do whatever they want to.

But i want my traffic back.

[dhaliwal]

MY Site has 235 backlinks and it was crawled everyday by google. Yes i mean everyday for last 3 months.

And the site that has seen traffic drop has not been crawled for last two days.

Other sites are crawled everyday.

I think they have set a few sites aside and might be doing some work on those and our sites who lost traffic falls in this category.

Are you guys seeing the site main page crawled during last two days?

They cached my site on 6 august but are showing in cache the site of 27 july.

I think we are shifted to some other group.

[BigDave]

But i want my traffic back.

Your traffic? It seems to me that you want Google's traffic back.

[dhaliwal]

whatever way you say about it.
But i think i have worked a lot for that traffic and created lot many articles.
you may say it google traffic, but i want my share back.

[rickbender1940]

dhaliwal: we see the same thing, since Aug 5 no Googlebot visits at all. Normally the entire site got crawled once a day

[tigger]

yep she's vanished since 5/8 and a sudden drop in traffic too, very odd

[adfree]

ferfer - this is very interesting! I will have to give it more thought but in general that would be how I would avoid to throw my users tons of ebay listings into their faces.

[dhaliwal]

so if you all are not having googlebot indexing your sites for last two days, it means we all are now in a different group for google.

The people google will avoid.

Otherwise there is no reason as to why we are deprived of the traffic inspite of quality content, high pr and sites within guidelines of webmasters quality.

[dhaliwal]

so if you all are not having googlebot indexing your sites for last two days, it means we all are now in a different group for google.

The people google will avoid.

Otherwise there is no reason as to why we are deprived of the traffic inspite of quality content, high pr and sites within guidelines of webmasters quality.

Its sad but i think i will make another site with same content. cause i can't live for long without google traffic

[merlin30]

ferfer,

I think you are only stating what is already covered by PR.

For quite a while it has been accepted that to get the the spider to go deeper into your site you need higher PR - and to get higher PR you need to get more aggregate incoming links. Unless you try to get those 5,000 pages linked straight from your home page - which is not really very useful - you will have to build a deep navigation structure. So you will need higher PR....

[djgreg]

Hm.. I can't see a change in Googlebot spidering my site.
Got fresh tags every day or two and my sites are spidered very deeply.

so for me everything seems to be fine.
Although PR is 0 since the last PR update. But maybe due to a host change.

greg

[adfree]

I was given a 0 pr with the last pr change, only I know know why, lost 90% on that site.

Another site with same desaster kept 5 pr all along, yet it crashed August 5th to zilch.

[danny]

My Google traffic is way, way down - traffic from google.com by itself is only marginally more than Yahoo traffic.

My site's an old-time static content site, with about 1000 pages created over ten years. Was PR 7 (may still be, don't have IE handy) and has never had any major glitches before.