My site has gone in the crapper. I've gone from 1000 visitors per day to about 100. My google hits have gone down 95% and keywords which I was in the top 2 or 3 have dropped off the map completely. What is up?
Could be sandbox. Could be what I am having problems right now. My HOSTGATOR dedicated server has an uptime of about 30% for the last week!
Yeah - sandbox perhaps. How old is the site and how long did you consistently have ~1k visitors / day?
Traffic has been real steady for over a year. It actually increased the last month or two. I got out of the sandbox originally in fall of '05. It's about 2 years old. But the blogads are the newest addition as of this month. That's all I can think
Highly doubt its because of blog ads. You maybe just experiencing the normal roller coaster. Odds are it will bounce back.
(posted in the dance thread too but it's worth a double post in case it helps someone else) OH MY GOD I figured it out. My site was hacked and malicious code was in my header. There was malicious javascript for all the various search bots which had a link to a viagra spam site. Google's bot obviously saw that stuff and took me right off the SER.
Wow that's pretty devious... thanks for sharing too, i'll be sure to check that if i ever run into strange drops in traffic from serps.
Advised tht may help you: 1. Impliment robots.txt with disallowing .phtml, .asp, .jsp extensions if your site is in php. 2. Remove those maliciaous scripts from ur server they may reside in ur 777 folders 3. Put 404 error code for these extensions. (.phtml etc) 4. Try to catch those pages & after giving them 404 add them to google removal tool. 5. Dont try to get too many links to get on track continue providing fresh content you ll be at top within 4 months.
Thanks for the advise. I'm definitely going to go through all the code. I have numerous backups and the basic php files haven't changed. So I may just do an ftp replace of all those files. That would take less time than searching them all for the malicious code. I'm also going to make sure that all permissions are correct so those files can't be written. Since the code was in a header, there'd be no way to 404 anything. It would be every page of the entire site. 4 months? Damn. Thank you very much for the advise.
During the last 2 years my website (5 years old, PR5) up and down in G SERPs from #37 to #887 for the same keywords every 2-3 months. I did no changes to metatags, no new SEO, no new links except for natural new links from articles submitted last year. It drops suddenly and for the next 1-2 months is nowhere (87th page of SERPs = nowhere), and then one happy day goes up and again on 4th-7th pages. After being there for 1-2 months it drops again.
damn that sucks, yeah I'm interested if it effected your PR in anyway. Also, can someone define 'sandbox' to me.. I seemed to have missed the meaning, I was sure it's something to do with newly registered domains.
Sandbox is actually related to the newly setup websites but some risky behaviors that might make Google get suspicious about a website can in fact put that site's ranking and popularity in a similar mode.