June 27 - we fully recovered from traffic drop

traffic dropped on March 30

[draxofavalon]

<Admin note: See also June 27 - changes are a complete disaster [webmasterworld.com]>

We have a CMS based site, on March 30 suddenly we lost almost all our traffic. Till March 30 we used to have 37k unique visitor a day, and in Abril we only had 7k unique visitors a day... same in May and June... and today we have recovered all visitors and all top positions in SERPs.

Since March 30 we did a LOT of changes to try to fix the site... 301's, nofollow, better mod_rewrite, more linking and backlinks, reinclusion request... none of them worked till today.

btw, we never used Google Sitemaps.

[edited by: tedster at 8:07 pm (utc) on June 28, 2006]

[skibum]

Sounds like you took all my top spots. ;) Looks like everything vanished a few hours ago. Seems to come in irregular cycles. Top rankings across the board and then nothing for months at a time on both ends.

[jetteroheller]

At me exactly the opposit.

Main site since 1997

Themed sub domains since 2002
Most themed sub domains created 2004

All very stable in all search engines.

But today, practicall all lost

site:example.com okay
site:themed-subdomain.example.com okay
PR okay
only search postions lost

[Fridaynite]

@jetteroheller

exactly same to me.

[foodstyling]

Same for me; lost all rankings on a site exiting since 2004. Everithing else like PR, crawling seems ok.

[Jez123]

Me too. Lost one site that got hit badly last year and regained one that has been dead in the water for ages. I am hoping it's glitch as the site that has been lost is as clean as I can ever hope to get a site. Every single SERP has dropped.

[tigger]

yep I'll join in lost 80/90% of my G traffic looks like it kicked in around 21:00 GMT 27/6 - lets hope its just a blip as a friend of mine has also had a similar drop

[soapystar]

but google blips go in cycles of months..i think the term 'GOOGLE BLIP'..needs redefining...

[wanderingmind]

Yep, I have lost all rankings on one site today, which is my oldest and biggest!

In fact, Google dropped many pages for me on March 30 (but rankings in tact), pages restored on June 15th, and today, pages there but rankings gone across the board!

[wanderingmind]

Relief - I just noticed that for a site: search, my homepage is not the first result anymore.

This usually means, their screw up, they shall fix it at some point.

[tigger]

wanderingmind

Just tested that and yes my index is nolonger top either

[dolcevita]

@jetteroheller

Same thing happend to me today.
Didnt touch anything and didnt change anything. PR is still same.
All competitiors site are still listed as before.
Wonder what's happend here!?!

[Jez123]

I just checked my site:domain.whatever and all the supplementals are back! I thought I had seen the back of them.

I am really going to try not to panic this time. I have been hit by updates so many times with my site I ought to be used to it. It does annoy me that so many of my competetitors are dirty players with mirrored domains and all sorts of tricks are still ranking.

[MLHmptn]

Is this index thing on every DC or just certain ones? Every single one of my sites has the index page listed first. Serving my requests are 72.14.203.104 and 64.233.167.104.

[dolcevita]

I did checked too site: whatever.blabla
and my site is listed but i lost top 10 positions by all most searched words.
i try to be not in panic but i panic already.It never happend before.Didnt change anything.
Traffic dropped for 70%
I can understand slightly losing of position but i;m unfindable in first 100 search result by almost any word.
Jesus Christ whats going on here!?

[M3Guy]

Yep, it's gone a bit wrong this morning

I'm seeing similar results on a site: search as I did when a similar thing happened last month (i think), seem to remember that it all recovered after about 24 hours or so

Lets hope it does this time

[Duke_of_Url]

ggl traffic slowed this morning a fair bit, but not died altogether. Seems like its picked up a bit now. Notice PR went to blank on my homepage for a while, but is back now.

DoU

[wanderingmind]

Jez,

My supplementals are back too. 1000 of them!

Its almost like pre- big daddy!

[indias next no1]

my rankings dropeed by 80%, eventhough my main URL and other URLs indexed, they are not getting ranked in the search results, mine is 4 years old website with good quality content. Now, most of the SPAM websites got included in the rankings.

[Hissingsid]

Hi,

I strongly suspect that they are playing with semantics.

On 216.239.59.104

#11 widget finance
#5 inset #6 widget finances

On 64.233.167.104

#46 widget finance
#2 inset #3 widget finances

Stems!

Sid

[LeaveMeAlone]

It looks a shambles to me.

1) A site I input to was zapped a few months ago 2 days after a whole catalogue of papers was added to it. It came back about 3 months ago.

2)A site I read disappeared about 2 months ago via their duplicate proxy problem.

Today I find that (2) has returned: but (1) has gone again.

I seems like as they fix one problem, they re-create the other. Naturally, every other search engine is stable and sensible throughout.

It's a poor effort.

[300m]

"but google blips go in cycles of months..i think the term 'GOOGLE BLIP'..needs redefining..."

Yep I agree. In fact it seems to really get interesting at the end of each business quarter lately.

I see this regularly these days and I know that its wrong for me to think this, but sometimes i wonder if they do this to increase PPC and adsense revenue to make investors see growth spurts at the end of a quarter. Doubt thats a realistic thing, but I do see the "blips" every 4 months.

It should be redefined to Google Quarters

[soapystar]

imho we havent seen a single update since last year. All we have seen since the change to BD infrastucture is the attempt to get back to a stable serps and a point from which google can progress. These so called updates are simply flip flops of past serps with some minor changes (albeit major if your a site totally bounced). These may be algo tweaks or problems of moving data around. However i do not believe that an update has occured since the end of 2005.

[StarryEyed]

I too lost all of my G traffic around 9:00 last night. I have been on page 1 for my major search terms since 2001 except last summer at this time- same thing happened and I did not reappear until Dec 22nd...ouch this hurts! I had made no major changes to my site...is this going to happen every year from now on?

[Jez123]

I too lost all of my G traffic around 9:00 last night. I have been on page 1 for my major search terms since 2001 except last summer at this time- same thing happened and I did not reappear until Dec 22nd

Hmm. Odd. Exactly the same with my site. I think that google may have reverted to old data of the time that you and I were "penalised" (for want of a better word)

My site went at the mid part of this month last year and returned at Christmas. I assumed that there was someting up with the site, links to bad neighbourhoods or the like and cleaned the site massively, changed the link structure, dilligently rewrote all the descriptions in my link pages in case they were duplicated from another site (desperate I know) put in place redirects from non www. to www. and afterall my hard work and waiting I was "rewarded" with my positions returned! I should have waited it out I guess.

[FrostyMug]

more than a coincidence?...

around 9pm last night 27th of June I too lost 95% of google traffic as well. today, I merely get one keyword search an hour from google, where yesterday and before it was more like one a second.

WOW.. this is bad... just WOW

checking my site:www.widgets.com result, all my results are supplemental, though all the pages are still listed. curiously, the main index page is not at the top of the site: list, though it's still in the list of results.

[tigger]

this does seem to much of a coincidence for us all to suffering the same problem and therefor a G problem

I HOPE!

[jetteroheller]

Hmm. Odd. Exactly the same with my site. I think that google may have reverted to old data of the time that you and I were "penalised" (for want of a better word)

I do not belive in this theory

My main site is started April 1997 and has stable search traffic since February 1998.

At all the changing of Yahoo to other default search engines, Altavista, Infoseek, Inktomi, Google, I had from Yahoo default stable traffic.

My main site was running like a clock work since 8 years with around 25 thousand visitors average a month. 20 to 30 was all the range of up and downs from seasons.

[Dayo_UK]

Yep - homepage no longer top for a site:domain.com search.

Mountain View - You have a problem.

[Musicarl]

This hurts. Main site up since 1999, constantly adding relevant content, and crushed today. I wonder if Google devalued site longevity, since many of the sites that were hit have been around a while.

For most keywords, we still show up, but are dropped much lower (2nd to 11th, 1st to 5th).

I should probably be encouraged that the sites above ours are crap.