Multiple sites experiencing 25% less Google traffic.

[dreamache]

I have multiple sites on the same server, all in different niches and all drastically different in how frequently content is updated, backlinks, interlinked (some not, some slightly), etc..

On Tuesday I noticed on my primary site I had dropped a couple positions on a few keywords which I attributed the loss in traffic to that reason alone. However I noticed yesterday that not only that site, but all other sites have proportionally less traffic.

Now, the very interesting thing about this is keywords I rank #1 for across these sites, have received 25% fewer traffic too. So for a keyword that gets an average of 190 visitors on a Wednesday, got 130 yesterday (Wednesday). And I'm fairly certain it has been steady at #1 all day yesterday and Tuesday.

I talked to my host, no outages were reported. Checked analytics hourly traffic view, no signs of downtime.

The only thing I can think of is:
(A) Google has placed a penalty on every single one of my sites (which would be really peculiar)
(B) Something else I haven't yet thought of!

Very irritating. Anything similar happen to others?

[BeeDeeDubbleU]

Or perhaps people Google is losing traffic?

[tedster]

The only thing I can think of is:
(A) Google has placed a penalty on every single one of my sites (which would be really peculiar)...

If Google feels that one site is being particularly manipulative in some way, they have been known to penalize every site they can find that appears to be connected. It's not common, but it has been reported here a couple of times.

The key would be identifying what you've done that seems to be such a big guidelines violation.

[danijelzi]

@dreamache

Have you checked if Googlebot has been visiting your sites since the problems started?

I had a problem a couple of months ago with Googlebot being unable to crawl some of my sites due to DNS errors, which were not on my server, but somewhere else. My host said that everything is fine on our side, but the problem was still there. It appeared a couple of times x a couple of hours.

You can check to see if Googlebot has issues with accessing your sites by fetching your pages in Google Webmaster Tools.

[dreamache]

@danijelzi

Google webmaster tools has a 3 day delay, so I can't see any data when the problem started occuring, which was 2 days ago. I'll update this thread when I know tomorrow.

I was hoping it was due to the solar storm lol, but I highly doubt that's it, there'd be a lot more threads here from other webmasters reporting the same loss in traffic. :(

[dreamache]

Well I discovered the reason I'm getting less traffic via most keywords even though positions have unchanged, is due to the global extension of SSL that Google applied 2 days ago.

The (not set) row in analytics for organic data grew a lot bigger within the last 2-3 days. So in reality, it hasn't changed, so that's good.

However there still is a little bit less traffic overall, and I imagine that could be due to them extending SSL world wide and perhaps having technical issues? I don't know.