Traffic dropped with 70% since September

[Maggy29]

Since September (around the 20th) traffic to my site started dropping: I am now at a 70% decrease.

I've been reading a lot about this kind of problem, but can't seem to find the cause.

Remarkable changes:
1. Daily visit dropped from 220 to 80.
2. Number of hits has dropped with 50%.
3. Visits as result from search went from 50%, to 60%, 30% and back to 50%.
4. Number of hits through Google dropped with more than 70%.
5. Bing search results dropped with 50%, Yahoo didn't change.
6. Number of search keyphrases dropped with 50%.
7. In August the number of HTTP 500 errors suddenly increased to 75%. Since September this dropped again to a reasonable 0,5%.
8. Certain search terms that have been at the top of the list since the beginning, suddenly dropped.

Fortunately I don't have to live from this website, so it's not the end of the world, but I'd like to find out what caused this drop.

The site is 4 years old, and over the years the number of visits has only increased, slowly but steady.

Are there other things I can investigate? I don't use Google Analytics; all stats above come from Awstat.

Thanks in advance for any help.

Maggy29

[frankleeceo]

1. Google webmaster tools, you can track the visibility that you have lost. Maybe there is a new competitor that is taking your traffic. Diagnose which pages actually lost the traffic and engineer from there.

2. Check for server configuration errors, when HTTP 500 happens, there is usually a conflict or miscode somewhere. If you didn't find the cause and fix it, it's most likely still there. You may get less traffic because search recognizes those 500 error codes and stop sending traffic to those pages. Which results in you seeing less 500 codes simply because they do not trigger.

3. Check for the quality of your pages currently on the search index. do a site:yourcome search to find all the pages on the index. Is everything there supposed to be there and rank? Do you accidentally have category pages that are duplicate? Sometimes you can gain more traffic as more duplicates get ranked, and the filter hits and you lose it all.

[Maggy29]

Thank you for your reply.

1. I'm new to Google webmaster tools: I only started using it for this site, when this problem occured. Is there a way to see if a competitor is taking my traffic?
As I said, I'm only aware of one page that's been the number one since the beginning, but suddenly it dropped.
When I look for the pages that have become more popular, I find them in the results of one of these aggregate websites, who claim to be a search engine. But GWT says there are only 7 links from this site to mine; this is not a lot, isn't it?

2. My hosting company at some point advised me to make de admin directory a secured directory. Now they've advised me to remove this protection, since it may case these 500 errors. So I did this. See what happens.

3. It looks like everything is there, but it's a bit difficult to check: there are over 1200 pages indexed.

[Maggy29]

Are there any other places I can look, besides GWT and the statistics, to find out what happened?
For the moment I can only see that traffic dropped, but I haven't got a clue as to what caused it.

[roshaoar]

I'd suspect that something was wrong on your site and that the engines saw this and reacted afterwards. HTTP 500 errors suddenly increasing to 75% is pretty bad.

[Maggy29]

If it was caused by the 500 errors:
1. is it normal that the effect takes place the next month?
2. is there something I can do to "tell" the search engines the problem is gone?

Two other things I noticed in the statistics:
1. 303 errors increased from 11% to 25% in the past months
2. suddenly 406 errors appear: never seen these before. Can they hurt?

[not2easy]

What kind of site is this, static html, a WP or Blogger site? Those errors indicate a problem with content delivery and/or formatting. If you have not made any changes to the setup, has your host made changes that may be incompatible with your site?

[Maggy29]

It's a Joomla site. Nothing has been changed to the setup for years.
It's nothing special: just a bunch of small articles that consist of text plus an image. I add a few articles every week.

I'll ask my host if they have changed something on the server.

[Maggy29]

Well, my host says they don't make any changes to the servers that may impact the way websites work. Not sure if I should believe this.

[frankleeceo]

It's normal the effect is instant that your page will start lose ranking and traffic. content signals and user signals suddenly go to zero...so engine has to react to it somehow pretty fast.

I recently made a mistake and had one of my popular page (~1kviews per day) go 500 due to PHP memory limit error and WP setup. It occurred when I upgraded PHP, one of my old memory limit setting got reverted somehow. I checked several pages except for a few popular ones (duh) after the update. --lesson learned.

I did not catch the error for 1 full month, yup 30 days. The traffic dropped daily to about 20% compared to before when I noticed it. After fixing the traffic is slowly climbing back. I am on a third day of have site fixed and at about 40% traffic now. It's actually a good unintentional experiment.

Documenting the effects...After the error hits, the traffic is halved to 50% immediately (well no one can access it except ones that do via cache). Then, gradually drop daily until I hit the 20%...I guess will go much lower if I did not fix it in time.

There is nothing you can do to tell the engine that the error is gone. You can probably resubmit the page for index if engine has actually removed it, which I think they will after a given time frame. For my case, my page was still hovering on page 2 for my selected keywords (and still receiving traffic). So I did not do anything for my case personally, since I know google crawls that page pretty consistently by itself.

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As for seeing your competitor, checking google webmaster ranking changes is a good place to start, but that only works if you have it installed for at least 30 days. If impression stays roughly the same but losing ranking position, that means your competitor is now starting to out rank you. Or if you lost impression, then you know you pretty much lose those keywords and your competitors has 'replaced' you.

Then you can guess which ones did, see what they do, and how they do it.

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If nothing changed, does Joomla use plugins like WP (I don't know Joomla, I focus on WP only)? Plugin updates can still result in potential conflicts. If not updated, does Joomla have source updates? Old plugins may start having compatible issues. Even both have no updates, update to the server can still result in backward compatibility issues.

A few places to look and troubleshoot.

[Maggy29]

@frankleeceo Thank you for your input.

I only added the site to Webmaster Tools one month after the problems started, so I guess there's no way to compare. The data starts roughly at the point when traffic started dropping.

How can I see in Webmaster Tools how my competitors are doing? Is it related to the position of the keywords? And is there a way to see who my competitors are?

Joomla uses plugins, etc. like WP. Only I haven't updated the Joomla version, nor the plugins for years.