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Traffic on a strong site has taken a hit - please help!

Discussion in 'Search Engine Optimization' started by andyj00, Oct 23, 2009.

  1. #1
    The traffic on one of my main sites has dropped in the last 2 days to 40% of what it normally is. The site has been live for aound 18 months and ususally has steady, strong traffic. I've noticed about 30% of the pages are no longer in Google's index, which could explain for the lack of traffic.

    I have not changed anything in the last few weeks and no idea why the site has lost its traffic. I must admit, I havent built that many backlinks for it in the last few months. Could this be the problem? Or is there a Google dance going on at the moment?

    Please help!
    Many thanks.
    Andy
     
    andyj00, Oct 23, 2009 IP
  2. mark41185

    mark41185 Peon

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    #2
    If you didnt change anything then your best bet would probably be to just wait. In a few days, or sadly a few weeks, things could return to normal. Building backlinks is always a good idea. Doing so wont hurt your chances.
     
    mark41185, Oct 23, 2009 IP
  3. andyj00

    andyj00 Active Member

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    #3
    Thanks Mark. I'm hoping its the Google Dance or something. Traffic has only been low for a few days, but I've never seen it this low, not for a long time.
     
    andyj00, Oct 23, 2009 IP
  4. mark41185

    mark41185 Peon

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    #4
    well there could be many factors. i'm not sure what your site niche is but it may just be that your users arent searching as much at this current time. how often do you check your indexed pages? you may be surprised to find out that they could bounce up and down 30% all the time without your traffic ever feeling any effects.

    as long as you are not doing anything to upset google, you may come out of this with higher traffic than before. just wait it out.
     
    mark41185, Oct 23, 2009 IP
  5. andyj00

    andyj00 Active Member

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    #5
    One thing I have noticed is that lots of lots of my inner pages have lost their pagerank. Has there been a PR update recently?
     
    andyj00, Oct 24, 2009 IP
  6. nowimhere

    nowimhere Active Member

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    #6
    I just said in another thread, to spend a few bucks and get PPV.

    Either that or outsource your traffic needs on the cheap.

    Cheers.
     
    nowimhere, Oct 24, 2009 IP
  7. jagged

    jagged Peon

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    #7
    This could be the normal way of google. So i would not be too concerned at this time. if you find that in a couple weeks this is still the case then be worried. In the mean time just build some backlinks
     
    jagged, Oct 24, 2009 IP
  8. meeaou

    meeaou Peon

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    #8
    Did you stop any service ?
     
    meeaou, Oct 24, 2009 IP
  9. andyj00

    andyj00 Active Member

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    #9
    Nope, not changed anything.
     
    andyj00, Oct 24, 2009 IP
  10. andyj00

    andyj00 Active Member

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    #10
    I'll take that back. I had changed something - and now I think I may of fixed the problem.

    I had a look at my Webmaster Tools and was alarmed to find ALL of my pages showing crawl error of Unreachable. :eek::eek:
    Also my crawl stats were showing virtually zero since the start of the month.

    I was getting indications of Internal Server Errors:
    "The remote server returned an error: (500) Internal Server Error"

    So I'm guessing as Google could not "see" the pages anymore - so it decided to slowly remove them from its index thinking these pages didnt exist any more.

    This was really baffling as the web pages would render fine in a browser. So why could I see these pages and Google couldnt?

    Well I built myself a web page scraper in .NET and low and behold, went I browsed to the url, my tool also reported a Internal Server Error!!!!!

    Well and lot of removing code here and there to find out what code was causing the problem and some code I added in at the start of the month was causing a problem. This line to be exact:

    string language = Request.UserLanguages[0].ToLower();

    I used this code (C# in ASP.NET) to detect where the user come from so I could show targeted ads for the country.

    Well that line god dam bu66ered my code up and its ability to be seen by Google since the start of the month!!!!!!!!

    I've took it out now and I'll have to wait of course to see if this does fix the problem, but I think it will. I put the same line in another of my sites too earlier in the month and the same thing happened, pages being de-indexed.
     
    andyj00, Oct 24, 2009 IP