Has anyone noticed a traffic drop after the Boston attack events?

[virtualreality]

My site is for a specific US destination (not anywhere near Boston or East Coast) and I noticed a visitor drop in Google after the Boston attack. My ranking is still the same so I assume somehow my visitor drop is connected to this event. So have someone else noticed a traffic drop after the Boston attack?

[sajith90]

I had the same problem. But I think it is connected with new year celebrations (april 14)in india, srilanka, korea, tailand etc etc. Lot of south eastern county celebrate new year on april 14th

prasad

[backdraft7]

It's a seasonal drop...happens every year. Warm weather means more people outside and if your site is not "summer" friendly, you get the drop. Keep in mind, the global DDOS and web bot attacks are still in high gear and are predicted to increase this year. My server has been knocked down several times already. Slow server response will hurt your visitor experience and ding your conversions.

Tip if you run WP, run W3TC and lighten the load on your server.

[martinibuster]

I agree it's about the weather. People, particularly parents with children and college age adults have been out enjoying the good weather. There was also a two week window of one-week spring breaks for elementary school kids, smack in the middle of the month.

[incrediBILL]

Plus people were glued to the news for a couple of days wondering if WWIII was about to start which could keep them away from the web or not making travel arrangements.

Similar drop offs happened after those German tourists got their trip shortened in NY, and the Japanese tourists didn't like SF for a while either, etc.

[guggi2000]

@virtualreality Is your traffic back? We had the same issue, SERPs unchanged according to GA.

My traffic started to decline the night after the attacks and did NOT climb back. I do not know the reason, but check if your direct traffic went down too.

Our site:
Google 15% drop, Direct 10% drop, Bing 0%, Yahoo 5% drop

@backdraft7 Do you know any tools to check whether some http requests are hanging? I'd like to rule out the possibility that something is wrong with the server technically.

[virtualreality]

Thank you all for your replies.
guggi2000, my traffic is not back to normal yet. It went down after April 15. My site is very "summer" because it is for a tropical destination and I noticed that traffic usually goes up after April 15 when people plan their vacations. This is how it has been in previous years. So since the traffic went down on April 15 I assume it is somehow related to the attacks. Maybe people are more concerned to travel now?

[guggi2000]

@virtualreality Did you check Direct Traffic, Referrals and other search engines? I doubt it is related to the events.

We are still 15%, now even 20% lower... May is usually higher than April.

What is going on?

[virtualreality]

Same here. any idea what might be wrong?