Hello everybody, first of all excuse me if my English is not good. The last 7 days I noticed a significant decrease of my web site traffic, which went from 8.000-11.000 unique visitors per day to 1.000-2.000 After further investigation I have found that there are much less visitors coming from Google Web Search pages. First I thought that I have a penalty from Google, but there are some other facts that give me doubts and make me thing that it is one of these periodic Google ups and downs and no penalty. My site is not "made for search engines" or adsense, it has rich useful content for the visitors, related to computers and technology, with more than 1000 articles and news entries. I had a similar issue before some months when my site was still new, when my visitors had fallen from 2.000 per day to 50-100 per day. This lasted for 1 week and then may traffic started rising again and reached gradually about 10.000 daily uniques withing the following months. So I want to ask if somebody has noticed something similar with their sites in the past and give any ideas. What makes me believe that I have been penalized: - As I said, decrease of visitors coming from Google. I have still visitors coming from it, but for much less keywords than before. - My site appears in high SERPs in Google Image Search but no in Web Search - Maybe Google got angry with my site because I had created a script that logged the searches made through my internal Wordpress search engine and displayed the most used terms at the sidebar of every page. My bad, I had done it only for my visitors convenience and I should have found a way to block these links from Googlebot (maybe using rel="nofollow") What gives me doubts about a penalty: - My site still receives good ranks for some keywords (1st or 2nd results pages). Not for as much keywords as before, but for 5-10 of them. - Lots of visitors from Google Image Search (the same it was giving me as always) - If I search for "site:mydomain-here.com" or "site:www.mydomain-here.com" it returns more than 40000 indexed pages. The same it was returning before the decrease of visitors. - If I search for "mydomain-here.com" my site is still at the 1st place of the results. - In my Google Webmaster Tools area it still says that my pages are indexed and that my sitemap file is downloaded several times a day. No info about any penalty or violence of terms. So it is just a light penalty? Or just Google has cleared and reindexed its database? Thanks in advance for any ideas and info from webmasters with similar experience.
I don't know how long you have had less traffic, but I would not be concerned yet. If your position in SERPs does improve after a couple of weeks, I would guess that either you have been hit with a small penalty or your competitors have been busy improving their sites. /*tom*/
Thanks Tom, it looks like I should wait for a couple of weeks and see what happens, as I have seen other people in this forum reporting similar ups and downs. What I forgot to mention is that my site's pagerank (4) has not changed which also gives me doubts about a penalty. And here is the strangest part of the story, that I also forgot to mention, but it could be just a coincidence: If you use adsense, do you remember the 6th of May, the day when Adsense had a problem and earnings reporting was frozen for almost all day for all users? ok... this was the exact day when my site's search rankings dropped dramatically and my traffic reduced from 10000 daily visitors to 1000-2000. So I am thinking about the possibility of some Google maintenance and database cleanup this day or a bug which caused some data loss in their search database... or just a coincidence? Who knows...
Did your rankings come back, was it a Google hiccup? I have exacly the same symptoms, site is indexed and ranks for domain name, still has 8 sitlinks and PR yet gets no traffic when a few days back it was getting 6-7,000 a day.
same here .. having problems with a domain that used to rank very well for keywords and such .. and it is weird .. all of my rankings for each keyword seemed to have moved back 4-5 pages .. literally all of them .. so im not sure what to think or what i did to deserve this but yeah google has hit me with a penalty of some sort.
ckgni: I also have the same problem. First it was google image search which cut down the traffic, then google search followed the suit. I was getting 1200+ visits per day, yesterday it became 296. I am getting mad.