traffic from google has dropped

[dhaliwal]

anyone seen the drop in traffic from google?
I am seeing that the traffic has dropped nearly 50 % in a day while the pages in index are the same and also the SERP have not changed that way.

I am talking about traffic of nearly 7 k from google everyday and hence its a sizable decrease.

Looking for early answers on how we could check the things

[Brett_Tabke]

please - we don't do site reviews or call out other members sites here. Lets left that can-o-worms dujor alone...

[lorenzinho2]

interesting theory seattle_sem. I'm hoping where you're wrong is that the wild Googlebot activity today will result in those pages that are getting hit being reinserted back into the index (not just as urls). That if Googlebot is NOT hitting you today, then you need to worry about permanent loss of pages in the index leading to reduced clout of internal links.

[Lorel]

I manage 24 small sites (all less than 60 pages and all have static pages or the main content of their sites) and none of them have dropped in PR but most of them have gained in backlinks. My own rank for my major keywords has not changed.

I noticed one interesting thing which is that none of my clients have a backlink to my site so I did some checking.

[b}99% of the new backlinks are PR 3 or less, [/b] and the reason my clients are not showing any backlinks from my site is because my pages that I link to clients are PR 4 or 5.

So this is another useless backlink update

[zeus]

I dont think it has anything to do with adsense our sites, I do think they are making some testing for the next 2-3 month and this is the start, until they have a result that will ad revenue to there advertising on Google and that incl. not so good search results.

I still see not so good results on serps, no changes since 3-4 days ago.

[RoadTrips]

I'm wondering if google has capped which backlinks they show. For example do they cut off showing all backlinks above a PR5?

[zeus]

I have just looked through my site with the toolbar and I see there are a few established internal sites that now have a white bar, maybe thats the reason, I dont think it a penalty, but a falure in new crawl, maybe thats the reason for all of us, take a look at your internal sites PR bar.

[Marval]

Backlinks checks are useless these days - Googleguy commented on the change they made to that tool some time ago based on a suggestion of a member here - and knowing who links to my sites I can guarantee you that not even 10% of links are being shown and not a single authority site of the 1000 that have linked to me over the last 5 years are showing up using that tool. As far as drops in the SERPs - for the 62000 search phrases one of my sites came up for last month, only 20000 of them are still showing in any close to relative position according to my server stats. I dont use any scripts or dynamic content - its only a 80 page site that still gets hand edited every day - and looking at the SERPs - Id say that most of the "traffic terms" still have their good rankings, its just that 40000 phrases have dissapeared and thats about 70% of my Google traffic - all Ive got to say is thank goodness I dont rely completely on SEs

Someone mentioned linking patterns - Ive got both recip and non recip links coming in - and neither seems to have played a factor - affiliate links dont seem to have an effect either - there's something else being missed completely and I still havent figured it out.

[cabbie]

What Marval Said Goes For Me Too.In fact i think he is talking about One of my sites.

[edited by: cabbie at 7:54 pm (utc) on Aug. 10, 2004]

[ownerrim]

zeus, it's interesting that you should mention that. I just noticed a fairly high ranked govt page that has a white bar on. Been around forever.

[zeus]

ownerrim, Im not sure but I think I have seen this before where rankings where bad, because of a previues crawl from googlebot and now we get the results. Now Googlebot is spidering again pretty hard, so I think this result we see now will last for a month then we see some good results again next time.

[TerrCan123]

Could have been a pr update last week and they didn't show it, I can't ever remember two backlink updates with no pr update between them.

[ownerrim]

Interesting, zeus. I'll keep my eyes peeled. As if I don't already have serp-check-fatigue.

[mmanning]

FYI, The googlebot never stopped coming to my site throughout all of this. But they have not been putting up the refreshed pages the next day which has always been the norm.

I also think this might be some type of penalty. When you put in the exact string of text that I had previously optimized to perfection and I was always #1 in the SERPS, I am now on page 6 next to unrelated topics of sorts.

[trimmer80]

spammy pages with redirects, hidden links (about 50 of them) and other really crappy results are now at the top of the serps for alot of my keywords.
I dont mind moving down for other quality sites as much as for this. The results showed here are sad.

[Ian_Cowley]

I've seen more Googlebot traffic today than any other on record. This has come after we lost 80% of traffic on some very large (80,000+ pages) sites. Odd one this, a major update or did G loose a whole load of data?

[Tomseys]

They need to just go back to the way the SE was in the fall of 2003 and stop messing around.

I think a lot more people, searchers and webmasters, are using Yahoo.

[trimmer80]

I think a lot more people, searchers and webmasters, are using Yahoo

I still haven't seen reliable stats showing this.

[div01]

My one site hit hardest by these Google changes is now seeing record Yahoo/MSN traffic. My overall traffic is down only 50% while my Google traffic is down about 95%. P

[globals]

trimmer80,

that's exactly the case in the are I am in. 4 "classic" spam networks took top 10 in most terms and I am surprised how it could have happened.

[gomer]

But I am sure these 4 "classic" spam networks really know how to take advantage of the authority scoring system some people are raving about.

[erykalefrak]

Ok, as mentioned above with some others, I suddenly have no PageRank. Would now be the time to panic?

[akreider]

My website has about 40,000 pages and is educational (nonprofit). Google traffic is up 50% over the past several days, but my main SERP hasn't moved.

My traffic fluctuates a lot, so it is too early to tell if this change is permanent. But somebody has to be getting an increase in traffic to balance out the decrease of other sites. Could it be that Google is tilting the algorithm to favour noncommercial sites?

Aaron

[erykalefrak]

Well I hope that's not the case, because that will be the end of google. When I go to a search engine, 9 times out of ten I am not looking for Joe Schmos journal, I am looking for a solid informational reference.

[TerrCan123]

I went back over the sites I linked to lately and I joined a topsites script last month so deleted that link. May not even be the reason but it is the only one of the links they could question. The link simply went to a top listing of related sites, nothing spammy. Without any word on what happened last week others might want to go over the links they added and see if any don't have pagerank like this one.

[erykalefrak]

OK, something I noticed, you guys check your sites that have fallen... a while back I found out about a googlebot meta tag to put in the header... all of the competition and personal sites that have risen or not been affected did not have this tag, or a robots.txt file... I did have both of those... maybe this is the cause?

[trimmer80]

a site of mine with a 70% decrease didn't have robots.txt, another that hasn't been hit does have robots metatag (robots, not the googlebot one i have seen floating around).

[cabbie]

The site of mine that lost 70% traffic has a background color #330000.
Anybody else who lost traffic have that color?

[shri]

>> background color #330000.

A couple of us shared a good laugh at pubcon 6.5 about starting a rumor about a new bleeding edge trend... "optimizing for page 10". Little did I know ... *shakes his head*

[BigJay]

My traffic had dropped over the weekend, but has since returned.

backlinks increased significantly, which I expected based upon the work I did in late June.

Anyone else had a lul, then return of traffic?

[donferguson]

A comment on post from my3cents at the start of this thread.

I agree partly with you, we have seen a rise in MSN hits,
we put this down to MSN running search results with out Look Smart payed results before main body of serch results as they use to.

This has been very benifical to our sites.

My only comment on google results is that for some key words (and only one or two) it is way off first base.
Top 3 in the key words are pages that are the results of Look Smart results and they are not Look Smart owed pages

Having said all this Google still gives us 2/3rds of our visitors