Hello, this site http://www.gearfuse.com/ experienced a substantial traffic decrease for the last 7 days. Traffic decreased by 30-40% overall because of a huge 70% decrease from all the Google referrals: Google Images (images.google.com / our most important referral), including all its other forms -- images.google.co.uk, images.google.ca, images.google.de, images.google.com.au, etc, etc and also from google.com (another referral), etc. Fortunately, on the other hand, traffic from Google (organic, search engine) remains at the same level as before. According to you, how can such a decrease in traffic from Google referrals take place so suddenly? Another information is that the referring site StumbleUpon (our second most important referral) also decreased by 60-70% -- however that might just be a normal fluctuation (StumbleUpon is a user-driven site where users rate and share stories), though the two events are concomitant. We were doing 10,000 page views per day before the decrease, and we didn't change anything with regard to before the traffic decrease occurred.
Maybe the google algorythm found images more appropriate to the search terms people were using to find your site.
Hi Dan, the site has been up since December '06. Could the javascript zone in the header (with the thumbnail pics) be causing the problem? We integrated that javascript code 2 months ago and maybe it just took Google 2 months to effectively "downgrade" us. Is it possible? Is it a common occurrence that javascript zones, especially complicated ones, can ruin a site's SEO?
It's possible - a lot of your JavaScript code is embedded and inlined after all. It's just another reason why I prefer unobtrusive JavaScript (keeps it out of the HTML and in a separate linked file).
Thanks for your reply. Let's assume we get rid of the javascript code we just talked about (and let's assume the cause of the problem is our javascript code), would we regain our previous rank and therefore traffic (before the javascript code was put online and seriously hurt us), and if so how long would it take? Is that something that is reversible in the short term?
That's going to depend on a few things. When was your site last crawled? Will you be getting rid of the code completely or just linking to it instead?
I have no idea when exactly, but I suppose it was crawled lately given the very recent traffic decrease, and we'll be getting rid of the javascript code entirely.
I'm not sure what happend but it must have been annoying. Google is due for a page rank update at the end of this month and maybe it was just just re indexing in preparation for this.