Sudden, huge traffic drop
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Hi all: I know this topic has been posted before and I read through the other threads but can’t quite figure out what my problem is. I maintain a beauty blog at http://browngrrrl.wordpress.com, and I’ve had a sudden unexpected traffic drop. For the past several months my average daily hits is around 350-400. On Monday, 9/27, my hit rate was 527, and on Tuesday 9/28 it was 72! Since Tuesday, it has been 72, 44, 60, 38, you get the idea, below 100. I have made any drastic changes; haven’t added or deleted tags and I can’t imagine anybody labeling my blog as mature! Any suggestions as to what can account for such a huge drop and how I can go about fixing it?
Thanks!
The blog I need help with is: (visible only to logged in users)
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Several people have reported RSS issues, but your feed looks fine to me. It can’t hurt to go to http://technorati.com/ping/ and manually ping for your blog. That might get things started again. I can’t see anything wrong with your blog at all.
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The same thing has been happening to me within the past week. Blog: http://lornakismet.wordpress.com I once reached a day in which I had an average of 1004 hits. Then each day when I checked with Site Meter, the average hits dropped and dropped.
Is anyone else having this experience with Site Meter?
I don’t know much about the WordPress meters.
lornakismet
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My blog has also been acting funny. http://drnorth.wordpress.com/
My most popular post is about Spielberg’s Jaws. http://drnorth.wordpress.com/2009/03/16/jaws-randomised/
A Google image search for “Jaws” usually brings me up as the number 1 result. In the last week, though, this particular post has received no hits, even though I asked a friend to visit it from her computer, and even though the stats show that searches for “Jaws” have been bringing people to the site. The same goes for two or three of my other most popular posts. My average blog stats have dropped by around 20 – 30% in the last week.
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Yep, me too. Dunno about Sitemeter but WP is showing a pathetic 24 hits. Weekends can be lower than weekdays, but this is absurd. I’ve not seen figures like this since the early days of my blog.
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I flagged this thread for staff attention. My stats have dropped off a cliff on my most popular blog, but the others are growing nicely. My theory is that google has adjusted the way that they rank images, and the Caption code is favoured, so blogs that don’t use the Caption Code will suddenly lose status. Just a theory, though.
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Thank you all for your help! I manually pinged my blog at technorati, and today, my hits are above 200, which feels a lot closer to normal for me. Do I need to ping my blog every time I write a new post? It sounds like this is a popular problem so I’d love to hear what WP staff thinks.
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@browngrrrl, prior to September 28th you were getting a large amount of search engine traffic from one particular term. After that date, traffic from that term has disappeared (but it seems to be coming back today).
I’d conclude that, at one point you were, let’s say, the last item on the second page of Google for a popular search term. On the 28th you dropped one place which bumped you to the third page, for a substantial reduction in traffic. Now you’ve moved back up one place again. Probably it will happen again.
The important thing to bear in mind is that this can happen for reasons that have nothing to do with you, or with search engine optimization or other technical stuff. It might simply be that, around that time, someone created a new page or post or web site that Google decided was more relevant than yours, so it bumped you down a spot.
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Dear Tellyworth…….
Where can I go to read up on how Google search engines operate?lornakismet
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http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/ – works for Google and knows what he’s talking about.
Most of the other stuff you’ll find about search engines is junk written by people trying to sell stuff, unfortunately.
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I’m noticing that the past few days too. My traffic has dropped quite a bit and couldn’t understand why. I too have been updating regularly and not sure if maybe its just my posts are not as interesting or I’ve changed something.
my blog is:http://happydoggieblog.wordpress.com/ any advice is appreciated! :)Someone mentioned going to technorati and manually ‘pinging’ your blog, is this pretty easy to do? I’m not too sure how to enter my blog as I haven’t had much experience with those features.
Thanks and good luck getting your traffic back everyone! -
@topdogottawa your traffic has not dropped – it’s increasing.
Click on the Weeks and Months tabs of your main Blog Stats tab and you’ll see an upwards trend. (There’s a drop in October because we’re only a few days in).
The drop in the last few days is the downhill side of a big temporary boost. You’re not dropping, you’re returning to normal.
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Thanks tellyworth, I guess I was just comparing days of the week/ compared to the last few weeks in Sept. Of course, makes sense that since it’s a new month the totals will look like they’ve dropped.
Your help is much appreciated, thanks a bunch. -
Thanks everybody for your help. Tellyworth, I expect you’re right about the search terms people are using to find my blog. I realize people often find blogs using unexpected search terms but I consider all traffic to be good traffic. I will keep this in mind if it happens again that it’s just google’s quirkiness.
Thanks again!
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Tellyworth said:
http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/ – works for Google and knows what he’s talking about.
Most of the other stuff you’ll find about search engines is junk written by people trying to sell stuff, unfortunately.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~Thank you. I went there and might RSS his blog. But oh oh oh he doesn’t want to use a Mac. Horrors! lornakismet
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