Recently Experienced A Sharp Decline in Traffic

[TheFinBin]

Hey Everybody,

For those who don't know, I run http://FinancialBin.com. It's a news aggregation site geared toward finance, economics, entrepreneurship, and tech. We also include original content as well.

I wanted to put it out to the Fastlane crowd and ask if any of you have experienced a decline in traffic recently. I relaunched the site in late May of this year. I had steady growth and was between mostly 2,000 and 3,000 daily unique visitors.

Then, last Wed., Aug. 10, the data center that my hosting provider uses had a major power outage. However, traffic picked right back up on Thursday to the 2,000's. Saw a decline on Friday to around 1,800, which I attributed to people taking an early weekend.

But, Saturday and Sunday were terrible -- under 1,000. Today, I'm crawling along again.

I really don't know what to make of it. Not sure if it's the power outage, maybe people are on vacations, people have their kids going back to school soon, etc. I have no idea really.

Any advice or help would be greatly appreciated. I have also experienced a decline in the fill rate for Context Web prior to this going on as well.

Thanks,

Dave

 

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[semsniper]

I had a couple of sites in that same data center. Really sucked that it happened.

While I don't have the traffic levels you do, outages like this can certainly harm rankings and traffic.
It's certainly possible that it's the time of year. Lots of websites suffer a bit during the summer.

Do you know if any keyword rankings specifically that were dropped?

Couple things i would do off the bat.
Do you have a Google Webmasters Tools account? And do you have a sitemap.xml ? If no, definitely get on up there. If yes, perhaps it needs to be updated anyway.

See if you can fire off a couple of new content pages, and make sure they get linked from your home page.
Do a little research and see if you can acquire some fresh inbound links from related sources.

EDIT: Sorry, I started writing before looking at your site. (obviously you don't have to worry about the new pages part)
And I see you use wordpress, so you should grab the xml plugin if you don't have it already.

 

[TheFinBin]

I had a couple of sites in that same data center. Really sucked that it happened.

While I don't have the traffic levels you do, outages like this can certainly harm rankings and traffic.
It's certainly possible that it's the time of year. Lots of websites suffer a bit during the summer.

Do you know if any keyword rankings specifically that were dropped?

Couple things i would do off the bat.
Do you have a Google Webmasters Tools account? And do you have a sitemap.xml ? If no, definitely get on up there. If yes, perhaps it needs to be updated anyway.

See if you can fire off a couple of new content pages, and make sure they get linked from your home page.
Do a little research and see if you can acquire some fresh inbound links from related sources.

EDIT: Sorry, I started writing before looking at your site. (obviously you don't have to worry about the new pages part)
And I see you use wordpress, so you should grab the xml plugin if you don't have it already.

Semsniper,

Thanks a lot for your help here. I downloaded and installed the XML Sitemap Plugin right away and then built the sitemap.

Yeah, it does suck that it happened. My site was down for 8+ hours last Wednesday. Didn't realize the extent of which until this weekend. Numbers are still very low from where I was as of this morning. But, it's slowly getting better.

As for keywords, I need to do a much better job of tracking those. Any suggestions?

Yeah, the site updates constantly -- which I assume will work in my favor as I re-establish my numbers.

I really appreciate your help. Good luck with your site as well!

Thanks,

Dave

 

[LightHouse]

Take a look in your analytics and see where the drop is coming from then report back. hard to say anything without knowing where the loss is.

 

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[valuegiver]

What's the frequency of Google bot crawl your site? If Google bot finds that your site is down during the crawl, they might downgrade your rank.

Hey Everybody,

For those who don't know, I run http://FinancialBin.com. It's a news aggregation site geared toward finance, economics, entrepreneurship, and tech. We also include original content as well.

I wanted to put it out to the Fastlane crowd and ask if any of you have experienced a decline in traffic recently. I relaunched the site in late May of this year. I had steady growth and was between mostly 2,000 and 3,000 daily unique visitors.

Then, last Wed., Aug. 10, the data center that my hosting provider uses had a major power outage. However, traffic picked right back up on Thursday to the 2,000's. Saw a decline on Friday to around 1,800, which I attributed to people taking an early weekend.

But, Saturday and Sunday were terrible -- under 1,000. Today, I'm crawling along again.

I really don't know what to make of it. Not sure if it's the power outage, maybe people are on vacations, people have their kids going back to school soon, etc. I have no idea really.

Any advice or help would be greatly appreciated. I have also experienced a decline in the fill rate for Context Web prior to this going on as well.

Thanks,

Dave

 

[semsniper]

No problem, FinBin

It's a nice looking site, I'm curious what theme you are using (you don't have to tell me)

For keyword tracking, you could use web position.

Other than that, routinely check and update your sitemap xml file and just keep doing what you're doing, I'm certain your rankings and traffic will return.

 

[TheFinBin]

Take a look in your analytics and see where the drop is coming from then report back. hard to say anything without knowing where the loss is.

I'm going to claim ignorance here. I use Google Analytics. Where exactly would I find that? Thanks for your help!

 

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[TheFinBin]

What's the frequency of Google bot crawl your site? If Google bot finds that your site is down during the crawl, they might downgrade your rank.

How do I find out how frequently it crawls the site? Not sure where to go for that one either. Thanks!

 

[TheFinBin]

No problem, FinBin

It's a nice looking site, I'm curious what theme you are using (you don't have to tell me)

For keyword tracking, you could use web position.

Other than that, routinely check and update your sitemap xml file and just keep doing what you're doing, I'm certain your rankings and traffic will return.

Sure, I don't mind telling you. It's called Genesis News. Thanks for the compliments!

I'll look into Web Position. Thanks!

OK, I'll do that. I really hope it does. Tuesday and today are worse ... ugh. Depressing..

 

[semsniper]

Thanks FinBin,

I'll address a few of your Q's

Analytics:
the first thing to do once you login to GA, is change the dates.
Select the day your site went down as your first date, then today's date as the end date.
Then underneath select the Compare drop down.
It will automatically compare the first 2 dates with the immediate preceding days.

From there you can drill down to keywords and other areas to compare what has dropped.
I don't know how helpful that will be at this point, since I am sure the drop has to do with the outage.

Robot Crawling:

Google Analytics automatically filters out robot visits, so you would have to login to your hosting control panel and they should have log files to look at or even other stats programs like AWStates which would show how many visits googlebot and others have visited your site.

 

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[AndrewKent]

Maybe just keep posting to forums like this...you picked up at least one new visitor

 

[healthstatus]

Outings happen, Google knows that, it was only a day, so that is not going to be a long term issue. I am guessing you lost a few spots on one of your main traffic keywords. I use Market Samurai to track my rankings for keywords. You can also go to Google Webmaster Tools and track where you have been ranking for keywords. You may need to do some offsite SEO work contributing some articles to other financial blogs with some backlinks to get your mojo going again. Make sure the backlinks use the keyword that you dropped in the rankings for as the link text. I have a high traffic content site in the health area and when the Google winds blow I get nervous. But I keep my onsite content updated and fresh (which it looks like you are doing) and then work like a dog on getting content out into the world that links back to my site, whether that is articles, posts on other health site forums, yahoo answers, wiki pages, my own mini network of blogs and social sites.

 

[TheFinBin]

Maybe just keep posting to forums like this...you picked up at least one new visitor

LOL. Thanks!

 

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[TheFinBin]

Thanks FinBin,

I'll address a few of your Q's

Analytics:
the first thing to do once you login to GA, is change the dates.
Select the day your site went down as your first date, then today's date as the end date.
Then underneath select the Compare drop down.
It will automatically compare the first 2 dates with the immediate preceding days.

From there you can drill down to keywords and other areas to compare what has dropped.
I don't know how helpful that will be at this point, since I am sure the drop has to do with the outage.

Robot Crawling:

Google Analytics automatically filters out robot visits, so you would have to login to your hosting control panel and they should have log files to look at or even other stats programs like AWStates which would show how many visits googlebot and others have visited your site.

Thank you for this. I'm going to look into all of this. I really appreciate it.

 

[TheFinBin]

Outings happen, Google knows that, it was only a day, so that is not going to be a long term issue. I am guessing you lost a few spots on one of your main traffic keywords. I use Market Samurai to track my rankings for keywords. You can also go to Google Webmaster Tools and track where you have been ranking for keywords. You may need to do some offsite SEO work contributing some articles to other financial blogs with some backlinks to get your mojo going again. Make sure the backlinks use the keyword that you dropped in the rankings for as the link text. I have a high traffic content site in the health area and when the Google winds blow I get nervous. But I keep my onsite content updated and fresh (which it looks like you are doing) and then work like a dog on getting content out into the world that links back to my site, whether that is articles, posts on other health site forums, yahoo answers, wiki pages, my own mini network of blogs and social sites.

Yeah, I do need to get back into writing articles and doing more offline stuff. I just need to go back and do repeat what got me to the 2,000, 3,000 mark. Thanks a lot for the advice!

 

[healthstatus]

Yeah, I do need to get back into writing articles and doing more offline stuff. I just need to go back and do repeat what got me to the 2,000, 3,000 mark. Thanks a lot for the advice!

I would be interested in putting together a group of site owners that get your level of traffic and up into a mastermind group, so we can discuss, troubleshoot and generally improve our offerings. If you and any other readers are interested in something like that PM me with your site url and traffic details.

 

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