The sad story of the artist who tinkered too much...

Pull up a chair folks and grab a box of kleenex. This one's gonna make ya weep.

There was once an illustrator. Well, there still is but that's not the point. Ya see, this here boy fancied himself something of a web designer too.

Way back in the late 90s he purchased a domain: http://inkart.net/ After uploading many a fine picture of animals and buildings, the boy found himself making enough money to quit his soul-crushing job as a mediocre PC support analyst. Good times.

Things were fine. Gettin' upwards of 1.5k hits a day he was. So, the boy branched out and added sub-domains:

http://stock.inkart.net
http://photography.inkart.net
http://animals.inkart.net (added on as http://wildlife-artworks.com/)
http://postcards.inkart.net (added on as http://wildlife-postcards.com/)
http://wildlife-magnets.inkart.net ((added on as http://wildlife-magnets.com/)

Then in the summer of '07 the dark days fell upon him. The hits dried up like a flattened toad on a West Virginia highway. Next thing he knew he could hardly manage 500 hits a day on his main site of inkart.net. The sales that kept him afloat disappeared.

The boy suspected his reckelessness with sub-domains doomed him, as the content is similar (and might be seen as duplicate content by Google) and wondered if putting them on seperate IPs would help undo the damage. Or did he submit his website(s) to some bad directories? Or maybe something in his pages that he couldn't see was scaring off the search engines?

He turned to the good folk at the DP forums with a humble offer. Now, as an artist he didn't have much to spend. But would hope $25.00 credit at any of his stores might entice some kind soul to help him out of the mess he made, and perhaps give him some insight how he managed to smother his own success with the constant tinkering.

Take care and thanks for reading. Please PM me if you can lend your SEO skills.

 

Hi Roger,

It's always deeply, deeply frustrating when something like that happens.

Just wondering at the actual quantitative change in statistics:

1) Where was most of your traffic coming from? (referrers)
2) Where is it coming from now?
3) Has the traffic dropped universally across all your sub-domains or is iit concentrated on one?
4) Did the traffic drop suddenly - or has it been a gradual progression over a reasonable period of time?
5) Are you getting any feedback about possible issues from your webmaster central site?

Dylan

 

Hi Dylan,

Thanks for your reply and sympathy!

2/3 Search engines. Google was my primary by far.

Still Google, but a little from Yahoo and MSN. Ironically I just got it listed in DMOZ a few weeks ago.

Across all sub-domains. stock.inkart used to get about 300 hits a day, and it's down to less then 60 on average.

Fairly gradual, but it has gotten worse the last few weeks. August was the worst month so far this year.

None. I have internet seer and one other monitoring site watching it and they haven't reported any major errors or problems.

I appreciate any help you can give! I do realize that it might just be a Google fluctuation thing, but I really get the feeling something I did to it fouled it up.

 

Here's the sad decline according to Awstats

Jan 2007 47367 58536 169141 1737177 8.53 GB
Feb 2007 26207 31612 136134 1269526 6.70 GB
Mar 2007 27340 32929 115430 1176661 5.36 GB
Apr 2007 22461 27000 78721 687178 3.34 GB
May 2007 27416 33459 133122 813562 7.39 GB
Jun 2007 22775 27896 70384 637156 5.48 GB
Jul 2007 17968 22295 69195 589864 4.42 GB
Aug 2007 14793 19094 67142 433632 3.15 GB
Sep 2007 2308 2726 8112 58197 428.06 MB

Ouch! The drop in Jan/Feb marks a redesign where I changed pages from htm to php. That being said, I would hope that Google would be able to re-index the site correctly after 6 months.

I update Sitemaster on Google frequently and try and keep on top of URLs that need to be removed. As I said I just got listed in DMOZ and I believe I have a decent # of backlinks too.

 

Hi Roger,

That actually raises an interesting issue:

If you changed your site from x.html to x.php - it means that a link pointing to www.inkart.net/buyme.htm will no longer be registered - because its now www.inkart.net/buyme.php.

EDIT: Note- this would not affect a link that points to www.inkart.net only those that specifically point to www.inkart.net/index.htm or any other sub-pages.

You might have already considered it - but if you haven't - it would be well worth implementing 301 redirects for every single htm page to its corresponding php page.

That will help ensure that you receive the benefits of all the links you had previously.

Dylan

 

And stock.inkart.net

Jan 2007 4426 4899 10112 80210 1.13 GB
Feb 2007 5199 5766 12364 92848 1.35 GB
Mar 2007 5032 5708 11540 93490 1.30 GB
Apr 2007 5378 5980 10707 95736 1.27 GB
May 2007 4915 5615 9704 85834 1.14 GB
Jun 2007 3344 3680 5610 53307 694.94 MB
Jul 2007 3039 3355 18803 68015 923.56 MB
Aug 2007 2409 2679 29893 67034 631.04 MB
Sep 2007 188 217 3826 5836 73.08 MB

Now, this site had no major re-design. The content has remained about the same the whole year.

 

I also note that you have two versions of your index - both index.htm and index.php work - but they each point to slightly different versions of your frontpage.

I certainly would not be the cause of the traffic drop - but worth remedying regardless I would think

Dylan

 

I set up a redirect a few months ago, but it looks like it's expired. I was a little nervous setting up too many redirects and having Google not like it.

I've deleted the index.htm and redirected it to index.php. I think that's a good call.

 

Hi Roger,

This is probably all things you've already looked at (so apologies in advance!) - but when I do a search on:

http://www.inkart.net

http://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com/search?ei=UTF-8&p=http://www.inkart.net&bwm=i&bwmf=u&bwmo=d

I get a different number of links than:

If I do the same search for http://inkart.net

http://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com/search?ei=UTF-8&p=http://inkart.net&bwm=i&bwmf=u&bwmo=d

I get an entirely different number.

Have you resolved any canonicalization issues?

Dylan

 

I'm not sure how I would do that. It seems those are all links from external sites? How would I go about resolving them do you think?

 

Hi Roger,

This post explains it well:

http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/seo-advice-url-canonicalization/

But the gist is that you should:

1. 301 redirect one to the other - it does not really matter which one you choose.
2. Within googles webmaster tools you can also tell them which one you prefer (it should be the same one you 301 redirect to)

Dylan

 

Hi Roger,

Just re-reading what you'd posted previously - can I assume that you used 302 temporary redirects on your old pages (you mentioned they've expired)

That's potentially a fairly significant problem in terms of how the search engines treat your site (because you are telling the search engines that you expect your content to return to old address at some point)

I managed to pull this up from something I'd saved from my rss feed a while back:

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/whiteboard-friday-which-way-did-he-go

My thought is that since your traffic started dropping at the time you switched to php its more likely to be related to that than any over-optimisation.

Dylan