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Help! Traffic dropped from 200/day to nothing!!?

by JonathanBoettcher
10 replies
Hi guys, I've been on vacation for a couple weeks, and yesterday I logged back in to check my traffic while I was gone and noticed that one of my sites that had a solid month of 150-200 uniques per day had all of a sudden dropped to nearly nothing each day, according to Google Analytics.

I logged into Wordpress and found my other stats counter said the same thing.

Most of the traffic on this site comes from hugely long tail keywords (it's an autoblog with mostly videos) so I highly doubt it is because I all of a sudden lost rank on a couple key terms.

Could there be some sort of SEO slap or something that I might have experienced? The main site is unique content, then there's an autoblog component with YouTube videos. I don't know how that would have triggered a slap, if such a thing exists.

Any ideas?
#200 or day #dropped #slap #traffic
  • Profile picture of the author MemberWing
    Who were your main referrers?
    Check who stopped sending you traffic.
    If that was Google than it might be either general or personal slap.
    General slap happens when Google matches your site against certain spammy/low value pattern and flush you off.
    Personal slap happens if someone (competitor) reported your site as spammy or gray/black hattish to Google.

    Just my guesses.
    Gleb
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  • Profile picture of the author JonathanBoettcher
    Hmm.. ok good point.

    Sources

    Visits

    % visits

    google (organic)

    3,759 88.38% (direct) ((none))

    211 4.96% ezinearticles.com (referral)

    99 2.33% search (organic)

    31 0.73% articlesbase.com (referral)

    27 0.63%
    That's from the last 30 days, and this is from the last week:

    ezinearticles.com (referral)

    27 43.55% google (organic)

    14 22.58% articlealley.com (referral)

    6 9.68% (direct) ((none))

    5 8.06% hubpages.com (referral)

    2 3.23%
    Looks to me like Google is the culprit...everything else is more or less in line.

    Even though the site has an autoblog component, I wouldn't say it is necessarily low-value, or spam like. The blog is at /blog, and everything else in the main domain (there are a dozen articles etc) is unique and useful.

    Any way to find out why Google has penalized me?
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  • Profile picture of the author MemberWing
    I'd love to hear answer on this question as well:
    How to find why Google penalized the given site?

    Although I suspect we'll only hear speculations on this subject.
    My personal speculation about it is is "guilty by association". If some part of your portal is considered questionable "in the eyes of Google" - the whole site will look dirty. Cut bad piece off and begin new life!

    Gleb
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    • Profile picture of the author rosetrees
      A similar thing happened to one of my sites earlier this year - went from 300 - 350 visitors per day to 35 a day.

      After a few weeks it picked up again and now it's back to around 200 - 250 a day.

      I didn't do any link building, articles or other marketing. All its traffic is from search engines.
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  • Profile picture of the author MemberWing
    PS: I agree with Rose on that. Sometimes Google need to send a few of its servers to laundry cleaning - so temporary death is a normal occurence.
    You may as well be back in a few days|weeks.

    Gleb
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  • Profile picture of the author JonathanBoettcher
    Hmm.. just logged into my Webmaster tools, and it looks like I've got over 400 404 errors. I haven't figured out why or how this came to be yet, but at the moment it looks like perhaps something screwed up on my site.

    I'm going to rebuild the sitemap and see if that helps... Strange though because like I said, I was away for a couple weeks and nobody was tinkering... I hope its something like that though, instead of a Google bomb.
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    • Profile picture of the author barbling
      This is one reason why I never care about SEO or Google anymore....Google can kill a site at a moment's notice.

      I'm into word of mouth marketing instead.

      Hope your traffic comes back!!
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      • Profile picture of the author NTN
        Banned
        Originally Posted by barbling View Post

        This is one reason why I never care about SEO or Google anymore....Google can kill a site at a moment's notice.

        I'm into word of mouth marketing instead.

        Hope your traffic comes back!!
        You had me until you said "word of mouth marketing."

        You must have all types of media, not just so-called free.

        A combination of SEO and Paid traffic (PPC, banners, direct mail, etc...) is Crucial to running a REAL business.
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    • Profile picture of the author kkchoon
      Originally Posted by JonathanBoettcher View Post

      Hmm.. just logged into my Webmaster tools, and it looks like I've got over 400 404 errors. I haven't figured out why or how this came to be yet, but at the moment it looks like perhaps something screwed up on my site.

      I'm going to rebuild the sitemap and see if that helps... Strange though because like I said, I was away for a couple weeks and nobody was tinkering... I hope its something like that though, instead of a Google bomb.
      If this is not your broken link problem, maybe someone is trying to do a Google bowling on your site? Just a though...
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  • Profile picture of the author Michael James
    Could the site be considered a product review site?

    The latest Google Slap hit those pretty hard...
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