Anyone experiencing a sharp decline in Google traffic since the weekend?

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letoII

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Hi guys,

My network of (non interlinked) sites (25+) has been quite steadily attracting more and more (Google) visitors over the last 4 months. However since this weekend the amount of visitors sent by Google has suddenly decreased with 50%. The strange thing is that I cannot find any obvious penalty:

- the number of indexed pages hasn't changed;
- the domains still attract visitors from first and second page SE listings;
- the 'domain.com' query returns the domain as the first result;

The one strange thing is that Google is spidering all domains very heavily as we speak..Is anyone experiencing a similar situation?
 
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@badassmama: I first thought that Easter would be the cause of the decline also but traffic is still down 60% for today.. Some guys at Webmasterworld are experiencing the same thing since the weekend. The only thing is that they probably didn't use Xrumer and LFE :D
 
I found the same, but from last night things seem more normal again - it was Easter but to me that relates to ppl not working and more time to surf.

I went through a list of blogs that I had to update from a few months ago for a freelance job I am doing, a list of high PR blogs between PR3 and PR7 and noticed just about every single one of them has dropped in PR by 1 or 2 points.

I also noticed a REALLY strange thing yesterday - I googled 'how long before tadpoles become frogs' because some tadpoles have been laid in a water pool near my house. I found what I wanted to know on the first site and clicked the SERPs away, then went to one of my own pages that I was working on - diet related. All the adsense ads on it were about frogs :confused:

I clicked that away and went randomly to a travel site - all the Adsense on it was about frogs. After a bit of clicking around adsense went back to normal, but I think the bloody G is up to something.
 
I haven't seen that significant a change, but there's been a lot of chatter about a major pagerank update in the past few days. I saw some of my sites go up in PR, some went down.

I'm not a person who lives and dies by PR, but maybe that explains your sites' change in G traffic?
 
I am hearing reports of more pages being hit by the 950 penalty. Are your pages in the last 50 results for search terms where they used to rank well?
 
@gregstereo I just checked the pagerank of domains; they all rank 0, 1 or 2. It seems there is no real connection between the decline of traffic and the current pagerank of a domain. Wish I had checked pagerank before all this started.

@badpete I dont really monitor individual keywords but found some keyword phrases that rank my site(s) on the first Google result page out of 100K results.

Thanks for your input guys, let's see how much we can find out about this.
 
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letoII said:
@gregstereo I just checked the pagerank of domains; they all rank 0, 1 or 2. It seems there is no real connection between the decline of traffic and the current pagerank of a domain. Wish I had checked pagerank before all this started.
Click to expand...

Yeah it's kinda hard to gauge things if you don't have a baseline. Parameter is a nice little app that you can use to check PR, and it keeps a historical record and shows you PR trend up or down for all your domains. You might want to check it out, it's free and I find it useful since I don't check PR that often but when I do I can see what's changed.
 
It has nothing to do with the pr. You've dropped rankings in ther serps for your keywords. Are you not tracking it at all?
 
@GloCk99 I'm not tracking any individual keywords as I target thousands of long-tail searches. Think it might be wise to assign 5 target keywords per domain for tracking search engine (algo) changes and competition.
 
I havent noticed anything on my pages but there has been a pr update are u still ranking the same?
 
@Darkface Some went up in PR and others went down (max 1 position). There is no difference in visitor decline between sites that went up in PR and those that went down.

Just thinking out loud here. I just checked the logs of my sites again. Some of my pages are ranking on the first page of the SE listings. Maybe Google is (partly) rebuilding its index and while the site command displays hundreds of indexed pages per site, the actual (fresh) index only contains 20-50% of my pages. This would explain why Google is spidering most of my sites so heavily at the moment.
 
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For those interested, some guys are reporting the same problems in this topic: http://www.blackhatworld.com/blackhat-seo/black-hat-seo/188385-sandboxed-page-ranking-3-a.html#post1687114
 
if you read webmasterworld (which by the way is also "attendend" by Matt Cutts) you would know that Google has implemented the new caffeine algo on some of its datacenters.
For some reason this new algo screwed things and the whole stuff whose restored to "normality"... despite this a lot of websites (including mine) have been affected heavily. mine like other websites has lost a lot in term of long tail (around 600-800 uv )

hope this helps

by the way: on the first of april google also updated PR
 
I didn't experience any change in SERP rankings however my sales thinned out a bit. But I attribute that to Easter. A few days before, during and a few days after any major holiday you can expect that.

People are out of town visiting family, have family visiting or more active offline.
 
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