90% drop in traffic last week - DNS transfer problem?

[downhiller80]

10 days ago our google traffic suddenly plummeted by 90%, and has stayed that way since.

The only change that I can think we made around that time was moving our domain and DNS from the site's old web design company over to the host that we are using.

To clarify, the host, IP address & hosting server hasn't changed at all. All that has changed is the registrant of the domain name, and the DNS servers for the domain.

Could that have caused any problems with google, or do I need to look elsewhere?

cheers

[tedster]

If DNS is misconfigured, it definitely can cause trouble with Google. I'd suggest using one of the DNS reporting utilites that are available online to make sure the new DNS set up is totally correct.

Also look at what search terms are affected - that might show you some important patterns. Was the site offline at all during the changes? Did the domain name "drop" for a short period of time? Those extra factors can mean that Google "resets" the backlink profile.

[pageoneresults]

All that has changed is the registrant of the domain name.

That could be a rather large change in Google's eyes. Does this particular Registrant own other domains that are similar and/or related? And, are those domains currently live and have revenue generating websites attached to them?

[Receptional Andy]

Good web analytics is also helpful in this situation.

Did traffic drop for particular keywords or themes? Was it from particular regional Googles or particular visitor locations? These types of questions can also help identify whether it is likely to be a problem with your site (e.g. because of DNS related problems) or a problem with Google's perception of your site (e.g. related to the registrant details or for other algorithmic reasons).

[downhiller80]

As far as I know the site was never down/dropped, it all happened seemlessly. That was certainly the intention and I never noticed any downtime - the DNS on the new name servers was set up well in advance of the actual switchover from old name servers to new name servers, so can't see that the site would ever have gone down?

[edited by: tedster at 12:39 pm (utc) on May 20, 2008]

[downhiller80]

No specific terms, virtually all have completely died. We have a very large number of search terms though, being a directory site of sorts. We don't target any specific phrases/words as such. No specific geographic area either, though virtually all of our traffic is and always has been from the UK (by design).

That could be a rather large change in Google's eyes. Does this particular Registrant own other domains that are similar and/or related? And, are those domains currently live and have revenue generating websites attached to them?

Hard to say, they're a massive webhost, one of the biggest in the country.

To clairfy the registrant is set to the business name/address of the website. It's the Admin/Tech contacts that are set to the webhost.

[tedster]

There's certainly a reasonable chance that the drop was not caused by the DNS change. If the hosting service made the change, they may well have enough experience not to cause problems.

Can you zero in on one or two of the bigger traffic phrases and see where they rank now?

Also, I'd suggest checking the results of a site: operator search as well as any reports in Webmaster Tools.

[downhiller80]

Webmaster tools: Total URLs: 122900
Indexed URLs: 105723

site:domain.com gives 19,700 - used to say anything from 100,000 to 200,000, though I've not checked it much recently.

I fear it's a stubs issue, previous thread here: [webmasterworld.com...]

[tedster]

Your fear may be well-founded. Google has been moving lots of urls out of the index and others into the index in the past weeks. And Google definitely has a dislike of stubs in the search results.

[pageoneresults]

And Google definitely has a dislike of stubs in the search results.

They sure do! And, based on your statement above that you are a "directory style" site, that just adds more challenges to the mix. Directories with stubs I think are one of Google's biggest pet peeves. I remember a few years ago when a directory owner was bragging publicly about having over a million pages indexed in Google. A few weeks later, most of them were gone as they were mostly stubs and Google just hadn't gotten around to purging them yet. No content? No indexing.

The only way you'll recover that loss is to start adding unique content to the stubs or removing them altogether so they don't suck the rest of the life out of your site.

[downhiller80]

Odd thing is as I mentioned we had a problem previously (linked above) and when we fixed and issued a reconsideration request we were re-instated within a couple of weeks...