I moved my site from a shared hosting to a VPS server on the last week of May, same domain, same website. Few days later, I just noticed a significant reduce in traffic. Is it because of my move or am I affected with the Mayday and recent updates on SERP?
I check my website and its working well. All have been transferred perfectly. Am I missing something?
sean22
6:39 am on Jun 20, 2010 (gmt 0)
Speaking from experience, I moved a good half dozen sites this year, and not once did traffic drop. The date you posted coincides with the June 2nd update. That sounds like a suspect to me.
Timetraveler
7:25 am on Jun 20, 2010 (gmt 0)
I've moved all my sites to a couple different VPS and never had a problem.
acemi
9:20 am on Jun 20, 2010 (gmt 0)
After a recent move from shared hosting to a VPS the page load times dropped by 50% and corresponding traffic is up by over 20%.
leadegroot
12:18 pm on Jun 20, 2010 (gmt 0)
Has the bot visit frequency changed? Have your rankings changed? If you aren't able to assess the raw logs and the site is verified on webmaster tools, I would click through all the pages looking for something odd - it reports bot visits, so you could look at that.
It is possible (but extremely unlikely) that you have a case of poisoned IPs. (An issue with the IPs on the new server that means the bots have them prelisted as banned, thus they don't visit, thuse your rankings fall through the floor).
Good luck!
digic
12:42 am on Jun 21, 2010 (gmt 0)
@sean22, Thats what I suspect, the drop was caused by Google Update.
@acemi, Did you compress your website? I know that Caffein likes fast website and compressing will make it load faster.
@leadegroot, The bots visit changed, on the top hits now is Yahoo Slurp and Google is second only. Google used to alywas on top. But I am seeing that visits is daily and regular. My PR remains. About poisoned IP's, are VPS hared the same IP's? If I verify the Ip, it shows that only my website is hosted there. Are there any other tools I can use to see who are using this IP?
leadegroot
1:19 am on Jun 21, 2010 (gmt 0)
Because you are getting some visits, an IP problem is really unlikely - visits would stop completely.
If Google has 'decided your site isn't valuable' then bot visit frequency would drop. So it does sound like you've been hit by the update. :( Are you able to compare rankings before and after? (again, webmaster tools, if set up previously, will give you that)
tedster
1:27 am on Jun 21, 2010 (gmt 0)
webmaster tools, if set up previously, will give you that
Earlier data is available the minute you verify your account, as far as I know. It's not like Analytics where history takes time to build.
leadegroot
2:07 am on Jun 21, 2010 (gmt 0)
Earlier data is available the minute you verify your account
Oh! Fair enough - I haven't needed to backdate any sites and had assumed the older stuff didn't come in.
But there is definitely a delay in the data. I got around to verifying a site that is several months old yesterday, and there's no data yet this morning (that doesn't imply that the older stuff won't come in)
Oxydada
4:58 pm on Jun 23, 2010 (gmt 0)
Same thing happened to me: moved to VPS from shared, and traffic coincidentally dropped. But, this was back in march/april.
I noticed that my new server has a higher response time, and Google crawl data reports that googlebot spends more 'miliseconds' downloading data than before (around 1300 now).
Could be that the reason of traffic dropping? A kind of slow VPS server (my site doesn't seem slow, tho)? Can response time affect rankings?
Sgt_Kickaxe
8:28 pm on Jun 23, 2010 (gmt 0)
I moved a site several weeks ago and added redirects to remove /index.php/ from every page at the same time and traffic hasn't fallen off.
Some things to check - make sure every single url is the same. - make sure your non www index page version isn't a parked page (some hosts monetize it). - make sure your .htaccess commands all work properly, it doesn't matter if it's the same host, it's a different server.
About hosts monetizing the non WWW version of your index page. If you have a redirect in place to send non WWW traffic to the WWW version the host might be blocking that depending on referrer. If you have incoming links to the non WWW version the pagerank may no longer be redirecting = loss of rankings. A sign the host isn't above doing this is to check your error pages for inserted host ads.
