How to increase traffic since that black day in July

[con771]

Since our traffic has dropped by now 40% since the beginning of July we are focusing our efforts at increasing our traffic.
We have always written unique, solid content. Now we are almost back where we started 2.5 years ago. We have to start from scratch. How does everyone keep increasing their traffic?

[tedster]

If you want to increase Google traffic, you'll probably need to understand what happened in July, test various ideas and find a fix. Other than that, you may need to find other sources than Google organic search - but of course, that would be a discussion for a different forum ;)

[edited by: tedster at 2:16 pm (utc) on Aug. 18, 2008]

[con771]

We have been over everything we know and we can't see a reason for our 40% drop in traffic since early July. Each week is getting worse and worse. We are getting desperate.

[edited by: tedster at 2:17 pm (utc) on Aug. 18, 2008]

[Lts95]

There's really only so much you can do. Obviously keep trying to figure out how to fix your traffic, but also try to make the most of the traffic you do have by working on improving user conversion and retention.

[Crush]

buy some juicy links

[tedster]

You also mentioned in our Yahoo forum that you lost 50% of your Yahoo traffic. That makes me think there's a very significant problem with your site and you should locate it. Don't give up the search to find the problem. If both the major search engines see it, there's something you need to uncover and fix.

Have you gone into specific search terms, rather than trying to solve it from the top level of just traffic and general ideas?

[londrum]

funnily enough i lost a lot of traffic around that time as well, but i know what the reason was. i added a load of new pages to my site. did you do that to yours?

every time i tell people about this they tell me i'm talking rubbish, but it's happened 3 or 4 times now, and i'm sure that it's true.

you dont notice this effect on big sites, but if you have a small-ish site (mine is about 1000 pages) and you suddenly add another fifty to it, then all the page rank for your well-performing pages gets diluted to these pages that currently rank zero. over time they will build themselves up as well, but you need to stop the page rank getting to them in one go. you need to spread your page rank out better by using rel=nofollow.

ever since i've been liberal with the ol' nofollow on my internal links i've been fine.

[apauto]

and you suddenly add another fifty to it, then all the page rank for your well-performing pages gets diluted to these pages that currently rank zero.

This is not true according to everything I've read.

[tedster]

I've never experienced that kind of problem either, and I work with a number of sites of that general size. I'm not saying it can't happen, but there's probably another factor involved as well.

[con771]

I haven't added many pages...no more then my usual updates...3-5 per week.

[silversteve]

Had the same thing happen to one of our sites in beginning of July... July 4th was depressing to say the least.

Here what I found:

Removed sitewide outbound 404 deadlink to a BBB site that had a redesign.

Removed a few outbounds in our old link page that were questionable, also 404's

Redesigned our side menu from 110 links, to 50. Added menus based on content of page.

Got some listings in top directories.

Found a few blogs to do some product reviews.

Published 2 press releases.

Published 5 ezine articles.

Started an article section on the site, adding more articles every week.

Cleaned up Webmaster Tool Errors.

Now we are back better then ever, longtails we never had ranks are now coming in. site: is reporting 2000 more urls!

Hang in there!

[con771]

I'm hanging in. This week was the first week in 7 that we haven't declined. We actually climbed back to where we were 2 weeks ago...now we're only down by 30%.
I've made numerous changes as you mentioned. However I've yet to see any significant rebound. I'm hoping this last update will provide the kick we need.....Fingers Crossed!

[sviba]

My site also dropped visits on July 2008.
Please refer the page [webmasterworld.com...]

[con771]

So much for the theory that traffic was down due to the Olympics. We are stable at a 30% traffic loss compared to July 1st.

[edited by: tedster at 3:31 pm (utc) on Aug. 27, 2008]
[edit reason] moved from another location [/edit]