Traffic Down - Any Guess On Causation

[anand84]

Hello WebmasterWorld

I had my site recently moved from one webhost to another (both servers located in USA). In my earlier host, the primary domain was example.com and there was an add-on domain example2.com which pointed to a folder inside example.com

While moving, I made example2.com as the primary domain and made the example.com point to a folder on example2.com

All these changes came after my older webhost suspended my account (outage lasted roughly 10 hours) for high CPU usage. It has been two weeks since.

I'm confused what's causing my site traffic (on example.com) to have gone down in these past two weeks. Is it the change of webhost? Is it because my site was down for sometime that Google thought of trusting my site less? Or is it because the domain name is pointing to a folder inside another domain which is not as much trusted as this?

I tried checking for random keywords in my niche and see that the sites seem to rank in the top page. But I am not sure if these ranks fell down from say Number 1 to Number 5-6 since I had not checked these earlier. Is it just plain seasonality?

Please advise..

[anand84]

I would like to add one more possibility:

On my earlier www.example.com site, I had one subfolder (of around 140 pages). That is a very low traffic website which I did not care to move when I moved to the new host.

I checked on my WMT and see that Google has found 140 crawl errors - all for this small subfolder. Could this sudden increase in number of 404s be a reason (though they do not bring direct traffic)?

[lammert]

Those 140 pages may have received link juice from other sites on the web and with the link juice falling away the ranking power of the other pages may also have decreased.

One other possibility is that your site has now moved to an IP address which has some shady history. If it is a shared IP address, there could be other sites on that address which are classified as bad neighborhoods.

[anand84]

Hi Lammert

Thanks for your response. I guess the first point may not hold true for my website since it was 140 pages of content that virtually had no value..Those 140 pages did not have valuable content, traffic or link value.

The second point seems possible. But I have now moved from a relatively unknown webhost to one that is a pretty popular name in the webmasters' households. I have little to no control over what other sites are in the IP.

I think Google algo is pretty outdated in that it still values websites based on other sites from the same IP..