Forum Moderators: Robert Charlton & goodroi
I would like to get feedback from webmasters who experienced huge drop in traffic because of these (caffeine) changes. We lost almost 40.000 daily visitors.
Site is well established and quite old with lot of natutural backlinks, online since 2004.
What do you think ? Are these changes temporary or permanent ?
Compare the Google traffic against those two. If all dropped, then it's user behavior.
If only Google dropped, then it's a change at Google.
Are all sites like this or only few? How long will this go on until it settles down?
1) Drop in Google traffic
2) Bing and Yahoo are pretty stable
3) Some or a lot of pages seems not be indexed or have been de-indexed (it has not to do with duplicate content. For example, I have an exclusive interview with a famous antispam company which is not indexed at all! What a shame! A lot of people could have been interested in it!)
4)Google drop started to be observed around November
5)Nobody has a clue
6) Everybody does not know what to do to fix it (most probabily you dont have to do nothing...plus i do not like this attitude. If something happens everybody thinks it is his own fault! Google is NOT God and it can screw things pretty badly! Everything coming from human beings is faulty and Google makes no exception!)
Great summary.
I think the same happened last year too. Just before the Christmas holidays. It settled sometimes in January. Is there a particular google DataCenter that seem to be the forefront and we can check and see how things are changing there?
It's not Christmas related. We didn't experienced this from 2004. So it must be something different.
Another thing we see on our webmaster tools, in Dec. Google increasingly is spending more time crawling our sites. They are, Drupal, Wordpress and Pligg based. So it's not the application, but if it's the server, where should they look?
I prefer having both analytics from calls to an external server AND from the web server itself. That gives a much more complete picture of activity.
When all is going well, site owners often have little attention for the quality of their information - the rest of the business absorbs their energy. Then comes a problem and the need for clear information to support decisions is right to the fore. Whatever solutions anyone uses, the ability to ask and answer fine-tuned questions about website performance is a must.
It's something like have a water-tight roof on your house. You may only appreciate it when it rains.
i am sitting by the river watching the river flowing...by the way, at the other river bank i can see Matt Cutts laughing at us!
It's interesting to see the up and downs of SERPs that are more volatile and speculate why. All SERPs are different. Here are some of the reasons I think some fluctuate:
Link Arms Race
I think some SERPs contain sites whose webmasters are actively accruing links and this causes fluctuations.
Lack of link variety
Rock solid ranks generally belong to sites that have a wide variety of inbound links. There are sites that never move, it's like they have a ten year lease on the first position. From my observations, sites that tend to have a pattern of inbound links that lack certain other kinds of inbounds tend to get whacked when the algo changes and starts to favor a different mix. And remember, not all data centers are using the same algo mix. So this is, imo, what causes the jumping around people see. Scoring high across the entire spectrum of different kinds of links, imo, this is what is going to keep a site rock solid.
Not sure the exact date they came back but it was after Christmas Eve as this was the last time I had checked them.
Analytics shows a traffic increase yesterday, more so than what I was getting for the past two weeks. Its not seasonal traffic as my site gets peak traffic for Christmas due to its content.
Little bit OT, but if there was a way here in WW to take input from webmasters experiencing poor performance/traffic drops.... about their sector, APIs in use, basic site structure of the site, content sources and syndication points, hosting environment, traffic type and nature and size and similar factors, one would be able to dump this structured data into database and look for common patterns.
This might help to better understand what are the common elements between effected sites. On the other hand there can be so many common trends/elements between sites that one might get false positives and while detecting common trends they might be completely irelevant to the issue at hand.
I've tested it with a single quality trusted link and it helped.
What I'm not sure about is if a steady link growth is needed.
This issue corrected itself in November but today the problem has reared it's ugly head again.
Will I have to wait patiently for several more months before it corrects itself again?
