Large drop in Chinese visitor numbers

[virtualreality]

I had my website (a travel guide) translated into Chinese a couple of weeks ago. After I did that I had many visitors from China. But since the earthquake happened, the numbers have dropped significantly and are almost zero now. Why is that?

[tedster]

First, I assume you are talking about Google visitors, correct?

In addition to the massive natural catastrophe, it is not uncommon for new pages to rank well in Google for a short period, but then fall off. Then they need to rebuild over time to a more stable situation. It's almost like an audition.

More than that, however, I also read your post in our Robots.txt forum [webmasterworld.com] about the mistake in your robots.txt file. That has to hurt.

[virtualreality]

Yes, I made that big mistake, but the Chinese visitors dropped before that. So yes, maybe it's because of this "audition" period. But still, I find it a bit strange that I hardly have ANY visitors from China (and yes, I meant visitors through organic search engine rankings).

[tedster]

Have you studied the search results that used to bring in traffic, to see what happened to your rankings?

[Lorel]

Wasn't there a change this last month or two that affected spam and particularly from China? I don't remember the reason but ever since then my spam mail has almost evaporated.

[asinah]

Could it be that you had the word Tibet in your content or soemthing about Taiwan. From my experience we faced the same problem until we removed Tibet and the Taiwan Province of China. We do get traffic to our Chinese content from Google but most of our traffic to our Chinese portal comes from Baidu. BTW during the Earthquake in Sichuan our traffic went up the roof for about 2 weeks in China before it settled down.