Forum Moderators: Robert Charlton & goodroi
Perhaps the most interesting thing of all is that all my 'major keywords' are holding the same top spots. In addition, my new featured articles (with plenty of inbound links) posted during this period don't have problems grabbing top spot.
Do you guys have any theories as to what might have happened to the site?
Some articles I read mention i should look up the number of entry pages that get traffic from G. I only run Google analytics. Is there anyway I can run similar reports?
Thanks much!
Vincent
Links can go bad, and you may have go yourself into a bad neighborhood.
Check ALL your links; and if in any doubt about quality, delete them. Now.
Start with reciprocal links, them look at paidlinks and any non-relevant links.
Then look at all the others.
One shortcut is xenu, which will show up deadlinks and any weird forwarding; but there's really no better tool than your own eyes!
But with google, it is always the most likely by a long way; and the measures I've suggested cannot do any harm. There's a chance that you have sick site syndrome; a collection of minor issues with a major outcome, but the pattern you describe sounds more acute than that.
-How many pages?
-Toolbar PR [ as an indicator of page strength ]?
-Link sources, are they consistant?
-Do you have any duplicate content?
-What did you do recently / any changes?
-Any other clues?
-How many pages?
18100 (1700 of those are real articles, rest are just forum threads and other non-content stuff like member list, user profile, etc)
-Toolbar PR [ as an indicator of page strength ]?
Well, homepage is 6. Other core sections have PR5. Most reviews have PR 5 as well. All the news (1400 of them) don't have good PR.
-Link sources, are they consistant?
Somewhat. Whenever we have new reviews, we get good links.
-Do you have any duplicate content?
I use my forum as a CMS platform for my news. So, there are always another copy of my news article on the forum.
-What did you do recently / any changes?
Nothing. I just post content as usual.
-Any other clues?
I don't have a sitemap that includes a link to every page on my site. But I have a primitive sitemap with links to my core pages... not the articles tho.
I don't use Google Sitemaps as well.
Well I don't have problem before so I didn't look into these options.
It doesn't seem to me he has a Google problem as the only way he can is he has lost his long tail keywords but that really doesn't seem possible if he major words are ok.
I would look into a hack traffic being diverted to another site through a DNS hack
[webmasterworld.com...]
They may be smart and taking a little at the time so it won't be red fagged so easy....
Check all files on your server see if any have been changed on a date you wern't working on the site, ask your hosting co to look over the server if you are dedicated, if you are dedicated ask them to look offer to pay them, have everthing checked out very carefully....
[edited by: tedster at 5:23 pm (utc) on May 25, 2007]
"Check all files on your server see if any have been changed on a date you wern't working on the site, ask your hosting co to look over the server if you are dedicated, if you are dedicated ask them to look offer to pay them, have everthing checked out very carefully...."
Even though i use 'static file style' to point to my news, everything is done with a single program. My PHP part of my brain tells me that the hacker has to insert some code into that single program for the hack to work? Is it how it works?
BTW, when i said "major keywords", the list included a lot of long tail phrases as well. I still have plenty of long tail keywords doing very well. I don't know, it's just very puzzling when everything looks okay... yet traffic keeps dropping.
I have a strong feeling that Google is sheding away my old stuff gradually... which could cause small traffic drop over time...
Am I making any sense?
This was my first assumption... so I started working VERY hard in March/April and posted a lot of good articles and obtained a bunch of good links. Those new articles got ranked VERY well (top 5 spots)... The new stuff brought in traffic, yet not enough to offset the G traffic drop. The frustrating part of the story is that I have no idea where I'm losing the traffic. The core pages are doing okay... not exactly fine since 30% missing G visitors are supposed to be visitng these core pages. :(
Google just doesn't shed searches, itf your site's positions haven't changed much and now you even confirmed they are ok then there check your dns this is not on your site,
Who does your dns. This can be checked for holes
[webmasterworld.com...]
Suggest you read this carefully and use the helpful links to check for holes in your dns if all checks out fine then begin looking at your site structure for problems.
Perhaps the most interesting thing of all is that all my 'major keywords' are holding the same top spots.
BTW, when i said "major keywords", the list included a lot of long tail phrases as well. I still have plenty of long tail keywords doing very well. I don't know, it's just very puzzling when everything looks okay... yet traffic keeps dropping.
Could this be a geo-targeting issue? Is it posible that irock is seeing different results than are showing in other geographic locations?
The frustrating part of the story is that I have no idea where I'm losing the traffic.
You really do need to have adequate server log analytics to resolve a situation like this. It's essential to know which pages have dropped in their performance as landing pages - and for which keyword searches and search engines.
Somehow you know your Google traffic is down - can you pull more detailed information from that same source?
I only use Google Analytics for my traffic analysis. Does this program allow me to pull which entry pages got their traffic from Google SE? If so, I can easily select a previous date and then compare the data to pinpoint the problem.
Thanks again.
Perhaps the most interesting thing of all is that all my 'major keywords' are holding the same top spots. In addition, my new featured articles (with plenty of inbound links) posted during this period don't have problems grabbing top spot.
I've been experiencing something similar with two sites i monitor. Both have excellent positions for good keyword/key phrases yet traffic is gradually dieing. One of them is down from approx 600 G referrals per day to a trickle of no more than 5-10 per day.
A noticeable decrease in G search volumes? very unlikely (although anything is possible in this industry...win vista?) i very much suspect a geo targeting issue and currently in the process of testing it further.
Say, if geo-targeting is also a problem, shouldn't we see an increase in percentage of US traffic relative to UK/Europe? Just some food for thoughts.
