Google stopped crawling our site - 80% traffic loss since june 2

[Mikey85]

Hello,

Since june 2 our site has lost more then 80% of it's google organic traffic (more then 30.000 visitors a day).

Till now, there is still no improvement noticable.

It seems that Google stopped crawling our full website:

Yahoo site explorer inlinks: 157.484
site: ourdomain.ext 28.300 results
Google sitemaps url's in webindex: 105.744

A lot of (longtail) content is not indexed anymore and google is not crawling these pages anymore too.

Our site (classifieds ads) still gets the same daily amount of new content as before the traffic drop...

What can we do about this?

[edited by: tedster at 1:54 pm (utc) on Aug 11, 2010]

[tedster]

Sounds like more than a crawling or indexing issue - crawling and indexing may only be a symptom of some core problem. I'd start by analyzing which query terms lost the biggest chunk of traffic and look for patterns.

Just on the surface, this sounds like you've been hit with a penalty, but it may also be some technical error. You've got some digging to do.

[Mikey85]

I have been digging alot, but no specific result.

It's probably not a penalty, because we still rank #1 on some keywords...

We didn't loose traffic on some specific keywords, but specially longtail traffic.

I really don't know what to do! We have optimized the content, there is still many daily fresh content,... But traffic is still 80% down!

[tedster]

Sounds like the Mayday phenomenon. Google has continued to work with long tail results since then, and June 2 was another watershed. Have you checked into what sites replaced yours on some of those long tail searches?

[dstiles]

Googlebot has been almost absent from our server (several dozen sites) for ages. It came back with a vengeance two days ago and is still crawling.

[Sgt_Kickaxe]

I agree with Tedster, it may be the Mayday results are finally affecting your site too.

It may also be related to how tough google is on affiliate sites, having tons of classifieds could easily fall under the same broad strokes used against affiliate sites depending on your site architecture and on page layout.

[1script]

I would separate this

Since june 2 our site has lost more then 80% of it's google organic traffic (more then 30.000 visitors a day).

From this

It seems that Google stopped crawling our full website:

I have actually seen both these phenomena play out separately on different sites. What I mean by that is: the precipitous G* referral drop may not be the result of (or reason for) G*bot's laziness as these two events may be completely separate. I agree, a lazy G*bot will eventually lead to decrease in G* referrals anyways but for the purpose of troubleshooting you may be able to find problems quicker if you separate crawling and ranking into two different troubleshooting tracks. Otherwise you'll be trying to find a single timeline for two separate events and would have to be rejecting valid theories only because they don't explain both phenomena at the same time.

[karter]

i've been doing some checking on sites I like to observe using 3rd party traffic tools, and found a couple showing remarkable and abrupt falls in traffic from june 2010, and dramatic means like from 100,000 down to 50000, to 10,000

Thing is, it only affects sites I would class as Google dependent commercial sites . Brandname sites doing the same stuff show not a blip