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Starhugger
Posts: 631
Joined: 4/12/2005
From: Canada
Status: offline
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Search engines hate me! :-( - 9/8/2009 7:23:36
My website has been up and running since late 2004 and the search engines have always been good to me. Suddenly since June of this year, my SE traffic has taken a dive - not just Google, but the other SEs as well. I keep hoping it is just an algorithm glitch and it will restore itself, but it's getting worse and traffic is currently down by 28% from earlier this year. I'm heartbroken and horrified!
The only thing I can think of that I might have done to disturb an otherwise good relationship with the SEs is that in May I changed from using Frontpage themes and created my own headers and footers and included them using FP includes (webbots). That meant every page was updated. It also took a few tries to get them all functioning properly and I'm still finding some pages with H1 text in the headers that I forgot to change when I copied the header text into each page.
So maybe the SEs decided I must be up to something nasty and downgraded me. Strangely, my Google PR has remained the same for the main pages, although my links pages (except for the first link page that's linked from all footers) suddenly lost their PR altogether and look like they're not even indexed. Could this be because they all had the same H1 header text? I recently changed the H1 text (i.e. a couple of weeks ago), hoping it can bring them back but nothing's changed yet and probably won't for a while since G changes slowly.
Can anyone suggest why my SE traffic has taken a dive and what I can do about it? I know sites go through this sometimes and you just have to wait for it to come around again, but this is the first time this has happened. Could it be because of the header/footer code changes? I'm trying to convert these pages to PHP to use PHP-includes, and I don't want to lose even more traffic if the SEs think mine is an unstable site or something.
Thanks in advance for any help you can give me about this. The site is here.
Starhugger
EDIT: I should also mention that traffic does tend to go down a bit in the summer, but this is much more than usual. My traffic always spikes at the beginning of the month (and a couple of times in between) and I see that it seems to be up closer to normal right at the beginning of September, but it's still lower than normal since then.
< Message edited by Starhugger -- 9/8/2009 7:29:05 >
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Mojo
Posts: 2472
From: Chicago
Status: offline
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RE: Search engines hate me! :-( - 9/8/2009 11:17:16
What exactly changed on each of the pages?
Did the URL's change?
Have you added new outgoing links?
What are the NEW things that you did prior to your site dropping traffic?
What are the top keywords that you no longer rank for?
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Starhugger
Posts: 631
Joined: 4/12/2005
From: Canada
Status: offline
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RE: Search engines hate me! :-( - 9/8/2009 15:36:34
quote:
ORIGINAL: Mojo
What exactly changed on each of the pages?
Did the URL's change?
Have you added new outgoing links?
What are the NEW things that you did prior to your site dropping traffic?
What are the top keywords that you no longer rank for?
Hi Mojo,
Thanks for your suggestions.
The URLs did not change. I didn't link out to any new sites that aren't established, legitimate sites. I can't directly compare exactly what has changed between the old and new headers/footers because I'd have to upload the old site, and to make a long story short it would be a nightmare to try to do that just to get the View Source. The new code is (at least reasonably) clean though.
When I checked Analytics, I realized that something did happen in May. When I uploaded the new pages with the new headers/footers, I neglected to add the Analytics code to all pages and it was a nightmare of fiddling to get it to work properly again. Again, long story short, I had problems because the Analytics code was conflicting with some other javascript I was using. Anyway, from mid-May to early-June my Analytics registered little or no traffic, even though there was still traffic (judging by Awstats and Adsense impressions). Looking at Awstats, May's traffic was normal but by mid-June it was down and has stayed down since then.
Is it possible that the Google search engine was using its own Analytics stats as a gauge of what my site was doing?? I had thought Yahoo was also down, but it's fine and even slightly up. It's Google that's taken a dive, yet my PR for main pages has remained the same throughout this year and is pretty much the same as it's been for years (PR4, occasionally dipping to PR3 briefly).
The keyword phrase that has always been my top keyword has gone way down - less than a quarter of what it was in January 2009, down by half in April, then steadily down to about 22% since May June. The #1 site for that phrase has a website copyright date of 2009! (Mine's been around since 2004.) I'm still the #6 site in Google SERPs (not counting the image results Google now puts as #4 on the results pages). I don't remember exactly what I was before but I don't think it was ever much different than it is now. Two sites ahead of me look like they're mostly keyword trolls without much, if any, serious content, whereas mine is a very fat content site.
This is so discouraging. :-(
Starhugger
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