Traffic Off, But I Can't Even See the Problem

If I can't see WHAT the problem is, I can't figure out a solution...

[caveman]

A few days ago, for a site of about 1,000 pages with good traffic, G referrals dropped about 40%. Not much news there.

However, for this particular site, we receive visits via 1,000's of kw's, and track over 500 kw phrases (typically we track less than 20 per site). The kw's we track for this site cover a representative sample of virtually all of the various sorts of ways we're found in the SE's.

We cannot find any kw's / pages that have dropped in the SERP's. Well, maybe 20 or so of the 500 have inched down, but an equal amount have inched up.

We've sampled a bunch of G servers, no clues there. We've reviewed logs, things seem to be down across the board as far as kw's go (% volume among words has not changed much).

If I can't SEE the problem, I can't figure out what the source of the problem might be. Our SERP's look fine.

I feel like I'm trying to find a *huge* boulder in a flat sandy desert, but all I can see in every direction is...sand. Never encountered this before. Any thoughts?

[Lorel]

is your web site something that students would inhabit during the summer but not during school?

I have 3 poetry sites that double their visitors after school starts (probably kids pilfering my poetry). But during the summer it drops off.

Now that school has started I'm getting a lot more price quote requests--which I assume are highschool or college students learning how to write an estimate to design a web site.

[landmark]

I don't know if this is relevant, but I have a site that lost about 10% of its traffic immediately after the Austin update in January. However, sales fell by 50%. I studied the SERPS and couldn't see why this had happened as the site hadn't slipped very much for my target keywords.

However, on studying the site logs I saw that traffic patterns had changed considerably, in that the keywords people were using to find the site had changed. Before Austin, visitors were finding my site using relevant keywords only. Following Austin, they were finding the site for a much broader range of keywords, including lots of strange, irrelevant searches.

Could something like this have happened here?

[caveman]

landmark, your experience is very consistent with patterns seen before, during and immediately after major shake ups like Austin. But as you note, a review of the logs will reveal a lot. During the odd drop in traffic that we experienced, the split between kw's did not change much, nor did the split between number of kw's in a search (slightly fewer 4+ referrals). What we saw would have been explanined if Web traffic declined 40%; all our boats sank proportionately...no unusual patterns that we can find, so far.

Lorel, it's another good thought. Specifically the answer to your question is 'no' but we are trying to figure out if some other external news/cultural force was at work.

BTW, it's not an academic exercise for us. Almost always when we see something we don't understand, and track down the cause, we learn things that improve our site, or our marketing.

[5stars]

I just came back to remark that my traffic was back to normal as of yesterday and see that caveman & howiejs has returned as well. That is GREAT!

I review my stats for 4 and 5 keywords strings and didn't find anything significantly off either and no missing pages or anything else I could even begin to put my finger on... So I am still duped but happy ;)

[caveman]

>duped but happy

5stars, you just summed up my life. :-)

[ALbino]

Well it's been two days since your guy's traffic went back to normal and mine is still diminished, so it looks like my problems are unrelated. That's dissapointing for me, but I'm happy for you guys :)