Where has all our traffic gone?

[fuzzy1]

Hey All,

We have a modest e-commerce site that plugs along merrily converting two to three sales per day on average volume of around 150 unique visitors. It's nothing to write home about, but it's been steady for about 4 years now.

As of last Friday, traffic plummeted to only 55 Unique Visitors.
(and no sales) I chalked it up as an anomaly.
Saturday- 8 Unique Visitors and NO SALES.
Sunday -10...
Monday - 4...
Tueday 6

Our page rank has not changed (much) for our target keywords on any of Google, Yahoo, MSN, Search Live, Ask...
It's almost as if our traffic is being intercepted somehow.

Also checked digitalpoint keyword tracker for keyword positions on MSN, Google, and Yahoo, and found but typical fluctuations in our position for all keywords on each engine. That's the thing that puzzles me.

Our traffic is about 20% from Google, 15% from Yahoo and a mix for everything else, but the drop in traffic doesn't corrispond with these figures AT ALL.
ALSO, still showing consistant average of about 75 crawls per day from various engines.

I've checked the "from_pages" for google and yahoo in our stattracking DB, and wrote a little code to spit out all recent searches as hyperlinks. Following them to either yahoo, or google for whatever search strings we'd been hitting for over the last month or so and sure enough... follow the search links and there we are. It's not like we've been sandboxed.

It's just too weird that after 4 years of consistant traffic all of a sudden people have mysteriously stopped searching for Kids Bikes, or Boys Bikes, or Girls Bikes, or variations - and this is typically our busy season.

WTF Over? It just doesn't make any sense.

[peterko]

It's really weird what you say, it's even sounds a little misterious.
But I think you shouldn't consider your tool results as pure indicators of the current data, it might be a slight delay. The sales reality is the major indicator of traffic. Just wondering, did you have all of you traffic only from the search engines or you had some from your backlinks too. If your backlinks gave you some traffic, so what happen with them now?

Have a great day,

[fuzzy1]

Yeah we had a trickle from a handful of backlinks, but they seem to have dried up too. I am just dumbfounded.

[temyong]

Now a days Google and other search engine very unpredictable try other way to create traffic like using social site for example.

[fuzzy1]

Unpredictable is one thing, but this doesn't make any kind of sense at all.
4 years of consistent traffic, then one day... nothing! (or next to it).
We're still ranking for Googel et al. I've looked a bit at digg and facebook etc., but the concept is lost on me. Did add an add this button for all such social sites, but somebody has to come along and click it. Come to think of it... this all started just shortly after adding said buttons. Hmmmm...

[temyong]

Try to watch this stompernet.com/ to give you some ideas I hope it will help you.

[Himalayan]

You are talking about sudden fall in traffic and visitors on well settled website, I think their is possibility of some updates in Google. Increase your website promotion activities.

[ezhel]

google and other SEs are very unpredictable indeed!

[davidgeo]

Check if you have any dramatic change in the indexing status....

[temyong]

Yup, Google is unpredictable thats why must do a proper optimization.

[David_ Bowie]

Although this may seem far fetched, check your cpanel to make sure your site has not been hacked and traffic siphoned off to another competitor. Although this seems highly unlikely, I have actually seen this happen a time or two.

Best of skill..
David Bowie

[progenic]

Update your site Daily.

[skysoldier]

I think you need to study and change on some of your techniques in seo so you can go on with the updates!

[temyong]

SEO always update don't left behind read all new SEO thread on this forums.

[ubuntu]

Update http://buzzebay.com/

[digitalseo]

Originally Posted by ubuntu

Update *link removed*

wut??? spammer

[temyong]

Well, I think he want an extra traffic for his site.

[psyphi]

Originally Posted by David_ Bowie

Although this may seem far fetched, check your cpanel to make sure your site has not been hacked and traffic siphoned off to another competitor. Although this seems highly unlikely, I have actually seen this happen a time or two.

Best of skill..
David Bowie

David Bowie,
Where and how in cpanel does one do this? I'm very interested in checking this out myself.

Fuzzy1,
Another possibility for the lost traffic could be sporadic or slow hosting. You might want to monitor your site with one of the website monitoring services such as host-tracker or montastic.

[francis84]

Originally Posted by fuzzy1

Hey All,

We have a modest e-commerce site that plugs along merrily converting two to three sales per day on average volume of around 150 unique visitors. It's nothing to write home about, but it's been steady for about 4 years now.

As of last Friday, traffic plummeted to only 55 Unique Visitors.
(and no sales) I chalked it up as an anomaly.
Saturday- 8 Unique Visitors and NO SALES.
Sunday -10...
Monday - 4...
Tueday 6

Our page rank has not changed (much) for our target keywords on any of Google, Yahoo, MSN, Search Live, Ask...
It's almost as if our traffic is being intercepted somehow.

Also checked digitalpoint keyword tracker for keyword positions on MSN, Google, and Yahoo, and found but typical fluctuations in our position for all keywords on each engine. That's the thing that puzzles me.

Our traffic is about 20% from Google, 15% from Yahoo and a mix for everything else, but the drop in traffic doesn't corrispond with these figures AT ALL.
ALSO, still showing consistant average of about 75 crawls per day from various engines.

I've checked the "from_pages" for google and yahoo in our stattracking DB, and wrote a little code to spit out all recent searches as hyperlinks. Following them to either yahoo, or google for whatever search strings we'd been hitting for over the last month or so and sure enough... follow the search links and there we are. It's not like we've been sandboxed.

It's just too weird that after 4 years of consistant traffic all of a sudden people have mysteriously stopped searching for Kids Bikes, or Boys Bikes, or Girls Bikes, or variations - and this is typically our busy season.

WTF Over? It just doesn't make any sense.

It also happen to me... I start feeling the drop down of traffic since last week... now, my traffic drop down for about 70%.

[David_ Bowie]

Originally Posted by psyphi

David Bowie,
Where and how in cpanel does one do this? I'm very interested in checking this out myself.

psyphi, unless you have the time and knowledge, it is best to hire someone you trust to take a look at your cpanel. Basically, if you put your site together and placed the codes in your cpanel, you would have to look at every single line of code and determine which code is malicious.

A few years back, I think it was a guy name Big Mike from another forum was pissed because one of his sites got hijacked and the hacker put in a code that was sending the payments to another account. Only reason Mike got wise to it is because his site was turning 2, 3 grand a day and then one day nothing.

Fuzzy1,
Another possibility for the lost traffic could be sporadic or slow hosting. You might want to monitor your site with one of the website monitoring services such as host-tracker or montastic.

Fuzzy, that`s a good idea too. I too have lost a great deal of traffic in the past few months and I`m a traffic broker! LOL A lot of traffic brokers are going out of business lately. Not really sure if there is a connection.

David Bowie