Since November 1 I am experience a sharp drop in Google traffic by 70 percent... hope it is temporary - 17 days and no improvements so far
This is basically what happend to me. Some of my main keyword rankings dipped too, but I really took a lot of damage on the long tail which destroyed my traffic.
Do a search at google for "msn" and check first result. Msn, right? Some links bellow first url, right? Google acknowledges that site as an "authority" to that particular query. I have some sites that for more than a year, 2 yeras in some cases, were "authority sites" from Google point of view, to some keywords.
It will come back! I had the same problem and I waited calm and after 7 days I got 30% more visitors! GOOGLE DANCE!
In late June, one month after redesigning my site it was attacked from spammers for 2 weeks. The site lost almost all SERPs. Since today I was working extremely hard hoping that SERPs will come back and almost after 5 months they are back.
UPDATE It looks like these sites were hit by a redirect hacker, I have a hunch this is why my rankings tanked. These pricks have easily cost me $500.
AndresS What makes you think that? Because my problem looks similar to yours but I don't know how to check for a redirect hacker! Cheers
I'm having a similar problem. Few of my main searches are off the radar and some new ones have come in. No idea if I'll get back the rankings for my old keywrds. I lost the PR of the site too . . but then it came back within a day. Hoping for the best . . .
To find out if you've been hit: Clear your cookies from your browser. Search for your site on google and click on your link. If it redirects to something like this then you've been hacked. You must clear your cookies because some of these redirect scripts will recognize that you're the owner of the blog/website and will just direct you to your site like nothing is out of the ordinary. Unique visitors will get the redirect, however. In my instance it was a simple upgrade of my wordpress version. I noticed they changed the permissions on wp-blog-header.php or a file with a similar name (i cant remember off hand) so I would have trouble updating this file, but allow the owner to write the file when you upload and you will be cleared of the hack.
When I was hit my site was generating thousands of links like: http://mysite.com/admin/14yo.jpg+index.html They were restricted with robots.txt. Thanks to my friend problems were solved. Since than I constantly monitor my site for any suspicion activities. Now again in last 5-6 days when I look at Google webmaster tools there are more than 4300 generated urls like: http://mysite.com/admin/14yo.jpg+index.html. http://mysite.com/admin/1237.html. They are restricted with robots.txt and they don’t even exist (when I click I'm getting ‘url not found'), but according to Google WM tools the site generates them. How is this possible? I have checked the site ten times and didn’t find any strange file. I use total commander to compare the site with clean version of CMS that I used and there aren't any differences at all. So the site should be clean, but according to Google WM tools the site generates them.
My site also suffers from the SERPS update. Lost 50% of my traffic since monday. Never violated any Google rules. I hope it won't stay that way.
Well folks after checking my stats today my traffic is back up significantly. Looks like that was the problem, thank goodness. ---------------- Massiva I'm not sure. Is this problem causing your traffic or rankings to suffer?
I feel better for reading the experiences of others here. Since about the 25th Oct. my site has completely bombed on Google, and I'm getting a trickle of visits compared to in the past. See attachment for the analytics view on google traffic since Oct 13th. I guess I'll just have to sit tight and hope it gets back to normal. It's a shame for me, since xmas is my busiest time of yr. and I get a lot of traffic and hence income from google ads. As far as I know, I didn't do anything to break any rules. I submitted a reconsideration request, but as that's one-sided communication, there's no way of knowing if they think you screwed up and got penalised for something.
Looks like you went from 300 to 100 visits. You might have lost some backlinks which affected some of your keywords.
This has happened to old and reputed sites all over the world. Let's just hope next update (maybe this next 10 days) bring good sites up and place all that shit down... Hey gloopy, that Analytics pic is exactly what i see in my panel. Since end of October gets down, down, down.... Depressing...