Google and 500 errors?

[dickbaker]

Back in September I started noticing an unusually high number of 500 errors being generated by my site. I had the people in tech support look into it, and they tried all sorts of things. The errors kept coming, though. Finally someone realized that my site was the target of brute force attacks that were consuming all of the server resources. They made some changes, and the problem appears to be solved.

My worry while all this was going on was that Googlebots would be shut out, and my rankings would drop. I'm wondering now if that's what's happened. Traffic to my site has steadily declined the last six days in a row. The chart on my stats page is a 30 degree downward incline.

Is the 500 error issue a possible cause, or is it more likely something else?

Opinions much appreciated.

[tedster]

I'd say no - the 500 error is just too far in the past to be the cause.

Time to dig into that traffic data a bit more. First, is it just Google Search traffic that declined? Second, is it only some search terms, or is it across the board?

[dickbaker]

Comparing Google, Yahoo and Bing, Google is the only one that's showing a steady decline. Of course, Yahoo and Bing only account for under 1,000 visits a day, whereas Google counts for several thousand.

I don't have a way to test keywords, as there's just too many. Thousands a day.

Last week I put up the new design of my site. However, none of the content or the navigation changed. Only the graphics. Plus, traffic increased the next couple of days after that.

[dickbaker]

Just checked my stats program as well as Google Analytics for Friday. Another down day. Google Analytics has shown Google organic to be 62-63% of all traffic sources for as long as I can remember. It's been declining all week. It was down to 57% today. In my stats program, Google was consistently about 37% of all referrers. Today it was 32%.

When you say the 500 errors are too far back to be a factor, what do you consider to be too far? It's only in the last week and a half to two weeks or so that the errors got fixed.

[tedster]

AH - I thought this was all back in September - the problem and the fix. Then it certainly could be an effect. Is there anything in your Webmaster Tools that gives you useful input?

[dickbaker]

I don't see anything in Webmaster tools. I had an error submitting a new site map on Wednesday (it was blank for some reason), but I fixed that yesterday.

I filed a reinclusion request yesterday, explaining that my site had been attacked. Don't know if they'll respond or not.

This hurts.

[dickbaker]

Numbers are still dropping.