Hi,
I'm from within the technical department in our company and was appointed to analyze the Apache logfiles regards Google referres dropping in free fall. Unfortunately this happened quite some time ago, to be exact it happened on 22th Oct 2010 and it never really recovered.
I've found a few threads regarding similar issues but still different enough so I thought I'd create a new thread. It's my first post here and I hope it's OK ... :|
Part of our site consisting multi thousands of articles is a forum with about 300 to 400 individual forums. They've been well ranked in Google and other search engines (at least well enough for us), but at that one day suddenly everything changed. We've written a small visualizing tool and graphed all referrers drilled down on important parts of our site and we discovered the referrer drop were almost exclusively to our forums. I've made a screenshot to illustrate what "referrer drop" means for me:
[
my-serve.rs...]
These are all referrers to the forums content. The vertical axis number are the individual referrer hits we got per day.
Since I'm the head of our tech department I know exactly what's going on, i.e. whether we pushed some change or not, and incidentally that week we all were part of an in-house training so it was definitely not possible anyone changed anything (besides we got full deployment logs of everything, nothing was done). Also server-side our hosting company did not deploy any configuration changes.
Our forum is based on Phorum and we've been successfully using it for years. Besides the obvious drop we've been now searching in the dark as to a) what happened and b) what can be done now.
The HTML templates used for the whole forum were made from scratch that year and launched at late end of march in 2010 and the numbers until 22th of October have been well and didn't disappoint us (i.e. we've a certain level of confidence that SEO-wise it's "OK", at least it's not absolute crap :p ).
Content-wise the forum holds millions of messages dating back to even 1999 and it contains almost anything and nothing about health related topics.
Obviously we'll take any measures we can as long as we know what to do, which right now we don't. We're toying with the idea of searching for a company to consult as for the SEO of the forum, but we're not yet there.
I realize that this all happened almost four months ago (don't get me starting thinking about this ...) and we've already taking measures that we won't miss such changes again ever. But even if I could turn back time to the 23th of October and we would detect that drop, I still would have no clue what we should have done.
I tried to come up with something related to that date but wasn't successful so far, probably the wrong keywords.
We're using two tools for web tracking: Analytics and the German based etracker. What's interesting is that none of them shows such a clear drop then our Apache logfiles. I've tried my best to ensure we're gathered the right data, only used 200 status served pages, ensures it was a proper page on our end (i.e. not JS or CSS) and of course the referrer. I looked at some of the Apache samples and all of them seemed fine, even tested the referrer queries and they were OK.
Interestingly: some of the referrer queries I tested, the ones which we received on the 21st of October, they mostly did not yield any result at all. But the ones I tested from 22st mostly still worked. This tells me what I know: Google, for some reason, refused to come up with our forum entries as being relevant out of a sudden and still does. However Googlebot is still hitting us the same as it always does.
Wow, now that's a length post ... I'm grateful for any hint I get,
- max
