Diagnosing hack, penalty or Google Analytics issue

[hansondodge]

Have read all posts of similiar nature and am still baffled by the below scenario. Am leaning toward cloacked hack redirecting traffic that I have yet to pinpoint, but am not confident and also am not sure what else to recommend. Any help would be greatly appreciated.

On 3/22 both Google search and referring traffic dropped by 80%. To date, no rebound in either.

1. No drop in page rank or SERP position.

2. Major search term volume in insights steady: no correlating drop.

3. No visible change in code. Have checked Iframes, robots.txt, etc. and see no visible hacker content.

4. Google index page count has gone up 285 pages since end of Feb, not correlated to added pages, yet, site map looks clean.

5. Ran Xenu Link Sleuth - 365 links timing out, 35 404's, 6 server errors and 699 ok. Most timing out pages are java and image pages.

6. Site had connocalization issue. Just instructed fix.

7. Oddly, Alexa, Compete, Quantcast don't reflect a drop in visitation/reach.

Which is more likely, a GA problem or cloacked hack redirecting traffic?

Note, am not hosting this site. Will be hosting a redesign that will not be ready for several months. As favor trying to assist with a problem on the current site and am advising current registered Google webmaster.

Have already advised -- check messages from Google, do safe site check, verify sitemap matches their last submitted.

What am I missing?

[tedster]

Hello hansondodge, and welcome to the forums.

Is Google Analytics the data source that shows the traffic drop? If so, do you have access to raw server logs or some other form of analytics that isn't js-based?

Also when you check rankings, are you taking both personalized and geo-located results into account?

[hansondodge]

Tedster, thanks for the welcome. This is the most impressive forum site I have come across.

In regard to your questions, I believe GA is the only analytics source showing a drop. W/out having host - web master access, it is also the only source I have direct access, but according to client they are not seeing a drop in their cart orders.

Have checked rank from both personalized and geo-located perspective.

So, maybe this is a GA error, but just never seen one like this before.

[tedster]

Thanks for your appreciation of the forum. There's a solid community here that makes this place as strong as it is.

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I'm mostly trying to zero in on the reporting accuracy as a first step. Whenever data shows something peculiar, that's the first thing I look at.

In the case of GA, for example, have you verified that the javascript code still appears on all the pages? I've known sites to make some kind of update to a group of pages and forget to include the js - well, clearly that will seriously hurt the accuracy of the data.

I also like to watch at least two kinds of analytics data whenever practical - server log based data and that based on javascript tracking calls to an external server.

Assuming that your GA is pretty much verified, and you've verified that rankings are still the same from other geographic areas (and at various times of the day) then I would definitely check into possible hacks. We've got a pretty thorough thread about server hacks [webmasterworld.com] in the Hot Topics area [webmasterworld.com], which is always pinned to the top of this forum's index page.

If the safe-site check comes back clean, then at least you're not hosting malware - but that doesn't necessarily rule out hidden redirects, parasite hosting of spammy links (that could cause a penalty) and so on. If the site is on Apache, they should verify that the .htaccess file has not been altered - and definitely browse the site with the user agent set to googlebot.