Deep crawl, DNS errors in GWT, Traffic Drop Nov 14

[getcooking]

On Nov 13 our site had an incredibly deep crawl according to GWT - biggest in a very, very long time (100% higher than the average daily crawl). Which is kinda odd because my own internal stats that track Googlebot didn't detect it (so I'm wondering what exactly it was crawling!)

On Nov 14 we started losing traffic, about 15% from the day before (and our traffic should be increasing each day this time of year).

Mozcast shows the SERPS with a fever of 102 for Nov 14 so I assumed this must be another Google slap (Panda hit site) but then I noticed in GWT that googlebot encountered some DNS errors with the site on Nov 14.

There wasn't much chatter about an update happening on Nov 14 here in the forum so I'm trying to determine what happened. Would DNS errors encountered by Google cause a traffic drop? (and I have been working with my webhost to see if there are any DNS issues and we can't find a single thing wrong).

Did anyone else experience a drop in traffic (ie Panda update) on Nov 14? This site had been in a recovery from Panda up until this hit so I'm concerned we've backslid now for some reason.

[Awarn]

I had an issue a few years ago. The site traffic came in so fast at one point that the site couldn't handle it and the traffic was bouncing back. And yes the server people kept saying nothing was wrong when in fact there was an issue. They said imagine all the traffic flowing through a funnel and if there is too much at a time the funnel just overflows (bounce). Solve by a bigger funnel. We were able to see it by one stats program was showing the traffic while another stats program did not. Sales were off too. I see those Google crawls lately too and they are huge. If they all came in at the same time they could potentially cause that issue.

[getcooking]

I just don't see that being the case here. We get many more hits per day than what Google claimed to be spidering. And we're set up to handle HUGE spikes in traffic across multiple load balanced servers for the site in question. None of which showed any bottlenecks in traffic from Google or otherwise. Plus, again, this was Google saying there was a DNS issue - it wasn't able to resolve our domain name to even get to the site. And if it was a bottleneck our other sites would have suffered since they go through the same "funnel". I track all Googlebot activity on our sites using my own tracking methods and my stats don't match what Google stated it crawled on Nov 13 so I think something went haywire on Google's end.

I believe that Google had a miscommunication while looking up the domains because no one here seems to have experienced any site issues during that time. Now, if those "errors" are related to the missing rich snippets I am not sure but they seem to coincide. Which also leads me to wonder if that is a glitch (hopefully!). Either way, the missing snippets has cut my site traffic down substantially despite some of our rankings actually going up this week.

[Sand]

I do believe that there was an update on the 14th. That was my best weekend in...pretty much forever, and it's carried over into this week.

A friend of mine who operates in a completely unrelated niche reported the same thing. In both cases, traffic was up significantly starting on Friday, and carrying through so far this week. Something went through, I'd say.

[Yidaki]

Is there any official info about the 14th? I observe a large newspaper website for which WMT recorded 1.600 DNS Errors (2.3%) that day and sent out a warning email. Search traffic didn't change. Crawl traffic was below average on that day but high nevertheless, so serverload could have been a possible cause.

From what i read here i'm sure the problem is on google's part so i wonder if there is an official statement somewhere ...?