Website traffic has tanked. Is it technical?

  • Hey everyone. Ever since January, I’ve noticed that month after month, my website traffic has nosed dived. I know that the content I continue to offer is the same. I also know that around the same time, I was looking at stopping spam so I deployed different Akistmet settings, removed ping back, trackbacks and whatever I could.

    Well ever noticing the troubling trend a month or so ago, I’ve turned ping backs on, trackbacks are a go again. I’ve turned off Akistmet and my traffic is still down. I’m not entirely sure if I did more on the code level or PHP side. I frankly don’t remember. So I’m at the point where I’m not sure if my huge drop in traffic is technical, or content/industry I cover. Is there anyway that you guys can help me to see if this is indeed a ‘technical’ issue or not?

    My website is https://www.sonyrumors.net

Viewing 2 replies - 1 through 2 (of 2 total)
  • Anonymous User 907751

    (@anonymized-907751)

    It usually has nothing to do with your WordPress installation, and it is highly recommended to follow up on new trends with SEO news (on SEOmoz.org, searchengineland.com, etc).

    Google recently launched a new update called “Penguin” which affected sites that were receiving bad, spammy links, or sites that were spamming, and over-optimizsed sites so the algorithm might have hurt you directly. Back in April of 2011 they launched the Panda update, which was even harder on a lot of people.

    Once again, you provided absolutely no information on what type of traffic was lost. e.g., search engine traffic, referral traffic, direct traffic so it’s impossible to really give an exact answer.

    Please visit Google Webmaster Forums if it’s search engine traffic that was lost and I’m sure many webmasters would provide you an actual answer.

    Also, after reviewing your site – the title that you have is extremely long. Just a tip that Google only reads up to 69 characters.

    Good luck & happy SEO!

    Thread Starter illegalprelude

    (@illegalprelude)

    Hi Daniel, thanks a lot for the comments. I’m actually not entirely sure what kind of traffic was lost as we’ve just recently implemented Google Analytics to track that. To give you an idea, we hovered around 1200-1500 a day where now we are around 500-700 a day. If you look at the following chart and change things to a month view, you will get a real sense of the drop:

    https://www.quantcast.com/sonyrumors.net

    For our SEO measures, we’ve been using Yoast WordPress SEO as our plugin. It’s interesting that you note the spam issue because our site used to get a ton of spam from other sites that seemed as if they had nothing to do with our content and somehow were just incoming links. Right around that time is when I implemented the Akistmet plugin and some other measures to reduce that junk.

    I can note that a big driver of traffic for our site used to be Stumblupon and now, using the same methods as before, we get maybe 25-50 hits a day where previous, we received upwards of a few hundred.

Viewing 2 replies - 1 through 2 (of 2 total)
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