Question

from a new guy

[Bozwell]

Hi everyone:
I'm very new at this whole web thing-but trying very hard to learn. I have a question-I listed my page with Yahoo about two months ago. I have a good ranking on the first page, and was getting sales from Yahoo referals. I made some changes to my page (meta tag changes)and some improvements to my site design-now I'm not getting near the traffic. My question is did I make a mistake doing this, my page looks the same? My ranking is the same-just seems like traffic has died. Any infomation would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks Boz

[jdMorgan]

Bozwell,

Welcome to WebmasterWorld!

...improvements to my site design...

Hmm... What kind of improvements? Is it possible that your site is now more difficult to use?

You might consider adding your site's URL to your WebmasterWorld profile if you'd like better advice. That
way, members here can check it for incoming links, see what engines it's listed on, etc.

Jim

[2_much]

Hi Bozwell, welcome to WebmasterWorld!

Do you have access to your web logs? If you do, you could study traffic patterns there. A variety of things may have made a difference, such as lost rankings for alternate keywords.
Check for this first.

[JamesR]

How big of a traffic drop are you talking about?

[kris]

Did the traffic die or did the sales die? Take a look at your logs. If your "traffic" (people who visit your site) died and your SE rankings remain constant it is most likely industry wide. Consumer shift in spending, market fluctuations etc.

If your traffic remains the same and your sales die, check everything. Check you competitors prices, check your navigation structure, your load time. Did you add Flash, frames, java or other elements to your site that may make it harder for some to access it? What exactly did you change?

[quiet_man]

Welcome Bozwell
Just a thought, but are you sure the traffic you were getting was from the Yahoo directory itself and not from yahoo.google.com (ie. web results supplied by Google that are served up by Yahoo after their own directory results)?
Changing your site design should not affect your placing in Yahoo, but definitely can affect your placing in Google (and therefore traffic levels from yahoo.google.com etc).
Sorry if that's really obvious to you!