Huge drop and spike in Google traffic happens periodically

[zorgo]

I had a site that had been growing steadily for 4-5 months to reach about 400 unique visitors a day with about 85% of it coming from google. About a month ago, my traffic from one day to the next dropped to 10%, about 40 unique visitors a day.

I verified that traffic from other sources was steady and it was Google originated traffic that had dropped to almost 0. Traffic remained low for about 6 days and then from one day to the next the traffic went back up to 400 visitors a day. I though I had recovered from whatever hit me, but two days later the traffic went all the way down again. Once again, it remained low from 6-7 days and then spiked back up for 2 days.

This cycle has been repeated about 4 times now and I have no idea what to do. My Google indexed pages seem to remain steady, links haven't changed significantly and I've been monitoring my site and verified there have been no downtime issues. Traffic from MSN, Yahoo, etc has remained steady throughout these cycles.

Has anyone seen this behavior before? Any ideas? I'm getting desperate here and this doesn't seem to make any sense!

Thanks!

[tedster]

When something like this happens, I'd say you need to dig deeper than raw traffic numbers. You need to be looking at the keyword data your can get from the Google Search referrers in your server logs. That way you can see which search or searches are affected and check the search results for those phrases as they shift. It's the only solid way I know of to zero in on where the issues are.

If your host does not offer you what you need in website analytics by default, your still have options. See our Website Analytics Forum [webmasterworld.com] for good discussions, and also this summary thread: Which Stats Package is right for you? [webmasterworld.com] If you're willing to use it, Google Analytics (derived from Urchin) can do a very nice job for you, as well.