900% drop in traffic in one day - could it be our host?

[Oman]

Howdy,

On or about August 6th, our PR dropped from a 5 to a 3 and in Google Analytics, we went from an average(over the past 5 years) of 2,500 unique visitors per day to anywhere between 300 and 500 per day. Much to our dismay, it's stayed that way ever since.

I pulled a report from July 1st through Oct. 1st. Here's a screenshot of my dashboard for that report:

http://www.myfootshop.com/images/goo...raffic_dro.jpg

One would tend to think that either we were penalized by Google or we fell victim to an algorithm change. We're pretty much straight shooters in terms of our white hat/black hat methods. So I doubt that we've been penalized.

The plot thickens.....We also run 123 Log Analyzer on our server. Much to our surprise, we found that our server stats also dropped off on the same date. The character of the logs remains unchanged in terms of entry/exit pages, time spend by folks browsing, etc. The only tid bit we could pull from our server logs that had changed was that there's been fewer types of browsers being used to browse our site. But IE is still tops and is present in the list of browsers.

Nothing has changed on our website and we're struggling to understand what may have been the source of such a dramatic and rapid drop in our stats. One question that still remains is our host. Is anyone familiar with how a host may influence your stats? We have our own dedicated server but keep it at a secure remote site with a professional hosting company. Any chance that our host could have made changes that could be the source of our problems?

Thanks.

Jeff
Myfootshop.com

[crankydave]

Where were the visitors coming from and how were they finding you?

Dave

[Oman]

Good question. There was a dramatic change in the source of traffic.

If you look at 8-1-08 traffic sources in GA...

16.54% Direct Traffic
16.86% Referring Sites
66.61% Search Engines Search Engines

And compare it to 8-11-08...

76.50% Direct Traffic
2.99% Referring Sites
20.51% Search Engines Direct Traffic


That's a huge drop off in those folks referred via search.

Jeff

[crankydave]

Yes, but "what" searches were they finding you for, which SE's and do you rank the same then and now?

Dave

[Oman]

Search terms and phrases remained unchanged. The character of the search terms are unchanged but the volume of search terms dropped precipitously.

And no, we don't rank them.

Also noticed this stat in GA...big drop in Google organic search returns. Here's a screen shot of the month surrounding the drop...

http://www.myfootshop.com/images/goo...nic_search.jpg

Jeff

[google junky]

I went to the Wayback Machine and they have nothing for your site after march of 2008. Did you block them?
Internet Archive Wayback Machine


Your netblock owner 724hosting.com doesn't seem to be doing anything odd that I can find.


The sites code isn't written well, so it is hard for me to know where to start with what could be a problem.
I know it is annoying to hear someone talk about having good code, so I will keep this to a minimum.
The most important code in a page of anything is what is written between the head tags. You may want to start checking there.


I'm not crazy about the java menu at all, but I did see that the java menu was there before you started having problems.

Do you have any idea what you have changed or did just before this happen?

[Oman]

Hi google junky and thanks for popping in.

No block on the way back machine. Not sure what might be up there.

We had no changes to the site in early August. It was a quiet summer with no site changes or upgrades.

Jeff

[crankydave]

Originally Posted by Oman

Search terms and phrases remained unchanged. The character of the search terms are unchanged but the volume of search terms dropped precipitously.

And no, we don't rank them.

Also noticed this stat in GA...big drop in Google organic search returns. Here's a screen shot of the month surrounding the drop...

http://www.myfootshop.com/images/goo...nic_search.jpg

Jeff

Jeff... Not sure what you are saying. If the phrases your visitors were using to find you (via search) remained the same. And your SE rankings for those phrases remained the same, then visitors stopped searching for those phrases.

Dave

[janeth]

Originally Posted by crankydave

Jeff... Not sure what you are saying. If the phrases your visitors were using to find you (via search) remained the same. And your SE rankings for those phrases remained the same, then visitors stopped searching for those phrases.

Dave

Which could be the case. I've seen a lot of search terms Spike for a month or two and drop off because of an idea that dies down.

[crankydave]

Originally Posted by janeth

Which could be the case. I've seen a lot of search terms Spike for a month or two and drop off because of an idea that dies down.

True but going from a 5 yr average of 2500 a day down to 300-500 I suspect rankings dropped off quite a bit. Based upon the TBPR drop, if you want to put any credibility in that, it's quite possible that the number of pages included in the main index dropped dramatically.

There's no "real way" to know if you're not keeping accurate data for all these things for the long term.

Dave

[janeth]

Originally Posted by crankydave

True but going from a 5 yr average of 2500 a day down to 300-500 I suspect rankings dropped off quite a bit. Based upon the TBPR drop, if you want to put any credibility in that, it's quite possible that the number of pages included in the main index dropped dramatically.

There's no "real way" to know if you're not keeping accurate data for all these things for the long term.

Dave

Yes, you are correct. I did not take into account the amount of time we were talking about

[Oman]

Dave,

I hear what you're saying, but what's actually happening is that the search terms are the same. SERP are still giving us good rankings on our hot keywords and search phrases. It's just that the number of times our key words and search phrases are showing up in the SERP is less than a third of what it used to be. When they show, they're in the top ten. The issue is that they're only being displayed 30% of what they used to be displayed. It's as if I'm in an AdWords campaign and I'm being rotated with search returns.

I was going through Google Webmaster Tools and found that Google didn't have a current site map for us. I've got my fingers crossed in that all we may need to do to get back on the charts would be to submit an updated site map.

Jeff

[crankydave]

Originally Posted by Oman

Dave,

I hear what you're saying, but what's actually happening is that the search terms are the same. SERP are still giving us good rankings on our hot keywords and search phrases. It's just that the number of times our key words and search phrases are showing up in the SERP is less than a third of what it used to be. When they show, they're in the top ten. The issue is that they're only being displayed 30% of what they used to be displayed. It's as if I'm in an AdWords campaign and I'm being rotated with search returns.

I was going through Google Webmaster Tools and found that Google didn't have a current site map for us. I've got my fingers crossed in that all we may need to do to get back on the charts would be to submit an updated site map.

Jeff

Those pages might be on the cusp. Moving between the main index and the "other" one. I don't pay a whole lot of attention to TBPR but the drop you pointed out could be causing issues with what pages, and how many, are included in the main index.

Dave

[erima]

It is very likely that you have a problem with duplicate content where someone grabs your content for the same product they are selling. You need someone to take a look and do a comprehensive analysis of where you were getting your traffic - what key words were getting the most traffic - and then determine where that traffic went.

[aviator67]

I had a similar drop over a 2 month period last December. I believe it's Google. They are the biggest fish in the pond and when they move, us smaller fish can get pushed head over heals by one flick of their tail! They won't acknowledge it and it's very frustrating. I wish there was more competition, but we have what we have and have to deal with it.

I would highly recommend the site maps. When I submitted my site maps (I have over 5 million pages online), my traffic has risen steadily since the first month they were online and continue to this day. Since I monitor Googlebot very closely (and every other bot out there), I can see how appetizing my database is at any given moment. Today, Google queried over 86000 pages from my site, once each second. The sitemap was the key.

If you find any other information during this slow period, let us know. But for the grace of G_, it could happen to any of us.

[microtekblue]

Yes, I do see a duplicate content problem with the domains. Try a 301 redirect of your domains so that www.domain.com and domain.com land to the same domain.

Also, your drop is probably in long tailed keywords. Have you stopped doing something you were doing ? Maybe a ppc campaign or haven't done a press release lately? I see you have many press releases, and those could have contributed to a lot of long tailed keywords for you..

[Terry Van Horne]

Originally Posted by Oman

Dave,

I hear what you're saying, but what's actually happening is that the search terms are the same. SERP are still giving us good rankings on our hot keywords and search phrases. It's just that the number of times our key words and search phrases are showing up in the SERP is less than a third of what it used to be. When they show, they're in the top ten. The issue is that they're only being displayed 30% of what they used to be displayed. It's as if I'm in an AdWords campaign and I'm being rotated with search returns.

August? Hmm, Could it be the result of Universal Search? That would to some extent answer the question as to where the searches are going. If you were in the top of fold you may have been pushed down the page or out altogether by OneBoxes, different media (images/videos) and sitelinks.

[Big Juice]

If these pages have not been updated recently then it could be a case of these pages going supplemental. I know that Google claimed to have gotten rid of the supplemental index but I think the only thing they actually got rid of was the term.

[Oman]

We pulled the mirror sites (.biz, .org, .net) several years ago.

Since we're a dynamic site using .asp we've been using xqasp for a number of years to pull the query string from our search results. I've often suspected that it might be considered duplicate content but it always seems to be considered a white hat method of getting dynamic pages indexed.

Jeff
Myfootshop.com

[Dinghus]

You had a 900% drop? So you are negative now?

Sorry. Had to chime in because that cracked me up. If you were getting 2500 hits per day, that is 100%. So to drop 900% would mean you are less than 0 by about 40k hits/day.

If you go from 2500 to 500 you have an 80% drop in traffic.

Other than that, I think your problem is that either your niche has died out due to the economy of the world, or google is messing with you personally, or something is screwball at Google. Take your pick.

I'm surprised this took so long to notice and react.

[Oman]

And I have to admit that many of our pages have remained static and unchanged for up to 12 months.

Jeff
Myfootshop.com

[Oman]

OK, you got me...but it was a catching post title.

We were slow to react due to the fact that sales remained unchanged.

Jeff
Myfootshop.com

[jjohnstn]

Originally Posted by google junky

I went to the Wayback Machine and they have nothing for your site after march of 2008. Did you block them?

This is very interesting... I had a sudden traffic drop from Yahoo in June of 2007, and the last update in the Internet Wayback Machine was in July 2008. I had blocked some IP netblocks in my servers firewall, though Yahoo was still indexing since then.

Does blocking the Wayback Machine cause search engines to drop (or reduce ranking) a site? I'm wondering why you mentioned it.

[subsystems]

The 900% drop thing made my brain hurt.

Best I can figure -40,000 hits would mean visitors plugged into the Infinite Improbability Machine instead of the Internet. <--- There aren't enough Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy references these days. Now that I made this post there are 900% too many.

[jennywill]

Just a thought but do you have a unique IP? If not could one of your "neighbors" be the culprit? I prefer having a unique IP because (correct me if I am wrong) my understanding is that google bans and penalizes by IP, possibly causing problems for others sharing that IP.

[The Founder]

I hate to say this... but are you logged in to Google when you are checking your results?

I've seen this before... as you know Google has been showing customized results (and more so over the past 3 months) than before... I suspect that your rankings have tanked beyond belief... but your are seeing *normal* results because it matches your normal search pattern of sites you frequent... mainly you own..

If that is the case.. the mystery solved.. if that isn't the case... then let's look at the next suspect.

That your server took a dump for some time.. what does your webmaster tools say.. is there a bunch of errors in the past few weeks?

[xecute]

I'm not all that clued up in this kinda stuff and so you could call me a newbie.... So I hope me posting this reply does not make me look stupid.

But, my site around roughly the same time saw a dramatic change too.

Luckily for me it was a rise in visitors and a very dramatic one too and has held since.

I was confused why this had happened at first as site wise nothing had changed.


the nI discovered that google must of tweaked there algorhythm of something and updated there results (which I think they may do every 6mths?) and our keywords we where aiming for all of a sudden was landing us on the 1st page in google search for them, mostly in 2nd spot. Where as before this update in August we where no where to be seen until about page 12.

Is it not simply because after google has updated there search rankings that searching for your keywords/terms no longer puts you on there front page?


Sorry If I am barking up the wrong tree, as I say I am not that clued up on this stuff.


However, I think if everyone looked at there figures that many would perhaps see a change in August (for good or worse) when google changed something (I'm guessing) which re-ranked the PR and also search returns.

I'm sure that is the case for me.

[a53mp]

Originally Posted by Oman

And I have to admit that many of our pages have remained static and unchanged for up to 12 months.

Jeff
Myfootshop.com

and your design and layout hasn't changed in about 12 years.

[jennywill]

By the way, my understanding is that duplicate content IS NOT a white hat method to get dynamic pages indexed (try internal and external linking). As a professional SEO for a corporation with 10 sites and over 300K products indexed in google, we are always trying to minimize duplicate content as well as outline processes to those not as web savvy to avoid creating more of it. I believe whoever told you it was ok to have duplicate content was not up to speed on their technique and theory. Serving up duplicate content, either intentional or not, diminishes the user experience; thus is not in favorable with Google. (Again correct me if I am wrong)

[watto]

After looking at your homepage, the first thing that jumped out to me was your meta tags and title tag. These could do with an update. Your title should include the phrases you want to rank for, then optimise your on page seo to suit.

Also, you might want to fix this:

http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=ww...Inline&group=0

watto

[google junky]

Originally Posted by jjohnstn

This is very interesting... I had a sudden traffic drop from Yahoo in June of 2007, and the last update in the Internet Wayback Machine was in July 2008. I had blocked some IP netblocks in my servers firewall, though Yahoo was still indexing since then.

Does blocking the Wayback Machine cause search engines to drop (or reduce ranking) a site? I'm wondering why you mentioned it.

I mentioned it because if he wasn't blocking the Wayback Machine then it could hint at a server problem, whereas the site wasn't able to be accessed for some reason or another. Although unlikely, it is always good to look at everything.
The Wayback Machine was keeping a excellent record of the site up until that time. It just seemed odd that it would stop all the sudden.

[aviator67]

Since Google (the big fish) doesn't tell any of these so called SEO 'professionals' what in the world is going on under the cowl, they are just guessing too. Looking at your site, I would say it is in need an overhaul. You need to let G know what you have. Sitemaps, don't have any? Get some, and do it quickly. That will fix it. If you have 500 products, make sure that you sitemap includes them. All top tier sites have sitemaps, yours should have them too.

[jennywill]

I beg to differ with Aviator about "professional SEO guessing". SEO is an art as well as a science to those older SEO "professionals" that remember when Yahoo was king, Google was DMOZ, and black hat was just a fancy cap. As with any new profession, it takes a lot of time from those who stick with it to recognize the do's and dont's and the in's and out's. Agreed that some of it is trial and error, there isnt a one size fits all SEO strategy, and Google can change the rules at will; however, after years of study and application in programming and ecommerce one can get a pretty good understanding in spite of the Google mystique. Note that engineers that built the first car were probably guessing at one time, having to train the mechanics that came later to fix them, and all probably derived alot of their information from other diciplines that lent itself to techniques and theory used to create and fine tune the first cars. Oh, and Google does tell us what to pay attention to and what not to do.......giving those of us who choose understand in some depth pretty clear "guidelines".

[linnetwoods]

I read in an interview with two of the geeks from Google that I came across on WPN today that Google 'tweaked their algorhythms 450 times (no, not %...) last year! That's at least 900% more often than I would have guessed...

[newsblaze]

It looks like a penalty, but could just be loss of rank, loss of incoming links.
You have duplicate URL issues you could fix.

http://myfootshop.com/
http://www.myfootshop.com/
http://www.myfootshop.com/index.asp
http://myfootshop.com/index.asp
https://www.myfootshop.com/

These are all the same.

Change your server so only one of these works.
Use 301 redirects
Remove all references on your site to index.asp
(for example in your 404 file)

I suggest MyFootShop - Your source for healthy feet! ( because of your search results )
site:myfootshop.com

Consistency is a good thing!

You may have a lot of other duplicates because of the way your site works with those dynamic URLs.

Google says you have almost zero quality incoming links
link:myfootshop.com

That is probably a good reason for loss of ranking and traffic.
Are you linking to bad sites?
Or sites that are now gone?
Or sites whose ranking has disappeared?

I don't know if google can read and follow your java links
(check your logs to see if they are following them)

Many of your pages have close to zero content for a search engine.

Your massive java menu system could be causing search engines to give up before they find any useful content.
You could also put your javascript in an external file.

Sign up at Webmaster tools if you haven't already
Check to see what google says about your site
You will find a lot of posts about this problem in the discussions (go back to May June July)

[ami_iss]

Hi folks,
I can't find Google analytics code on the main page nor is there a great drop in traffic. Details -
At SnapShot of myfootshop.com (rank #60,732) - Compete myfootshop.com did not have any dramatic drop over the last year though it has gone down about 20-30% in the last month.
Alexa shows a fairly respectable traffic share and rank
myfootshop.com - Traffic Details from Alexa
They don't show the whole year of data though.

myfootshop.com - Quantcast Audience Profile
shows a 50% drop over a 1 year period, but nothing dramatic in August.

It seems to me very unlikely that such a dramatic drop would not be recorded in any place.
So before you change anything, see if maybe something changed in the analytics program. You should not depend on a single statistical tool even if your second tool is only a free meter like sitemeter or adfree. A second opinion is always important!

Code - ?? I didn't see any Google analytics or urchin script link from your main page but maybe I missed it. I saw only a Verification code to tell Webmaster you own the site. I don't think Google can do a detailed analysis unless you installed the urchin googleanalytics jscript on each page, can they? (that's the way they used to work).


In your header you have:
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=windows-1252">
That is Hebrew - do you have any Hebrew text? If not, then get rid of that line as it can't help anything for sure. Google may pick up on that and localize you in Israel. Be sure to set the location of your site to wherever you really are located!

All that menu javascript should be in a separate file. Raise the proportion of text to code and junk on the page to get a better rank.

Make sure you are listed in local business map. SERPs For Keywords like "Shoes" are going to have that onebox local business display at the top and that pushes you down on the page. That's new and may account for traffic drop over one year.

What happened? - Possibility - the urchin tool that is used by google analytics is subject to interference from other javascript on the page. That is _known_. If you added any javascript, or if IE changed the way it handles javascript, this may have affected Google analytics (If you really have it) . Another possibility is that Google's spider changed and now finds something on your site that it cannot read and stops on every page so what Google sees is not what is on the site. But as there doesn't seem to be an actual dramatic drop in traffic, just a slow drift that is not likely. Trivial possibility - someone deleted the main page urchin/google analytics script by accident, so you lost a lot of recorded traffic in 1 day.

PR change - sometimes this is arbitrary. One of my sites which has been around for 8 years went from PR 6 to PR 5 in a day, but a few months later Google announced that they they were sorry they had unjustifiably lowered the PR of many sites.

Google Algorithm change - Google algorithm changes all the time. No more discrete updates and no more Google Dance they say. One sign is if LESS pages are listed for a particular search than previously. I have seen keywords go from 8 million pages to under 3 million, just because Google was changing.

Duplicate content - In my experience, Google has many limitations they don't tell you about, and so they discourage practices that they cannot control and IMPLY that you will be penalized - but they cannot penalize you. Some of them we had better not talk about, but the issue of www is just a bug of Google and it is their problem. Google should list www.mysite.com and mysite.com as the same thing. You can't control how someone linked to a page or pages and many of these sites have been up since before Google existed. It makes no sense to penalize for that sort of thing, or for the numerous junk pages generated by Php forums and the like. That's just the way the software works.

IP: - Your IP is listed in SERP for specific text from your main page - I haven't seen that before. It is 64.239.149.234. Could that be a problem? Duplicate IPs (multiple IPs on one server) are used by everyone and his uncle so if Google ranked pages by IP it would be fairly worthless as a search tool. It is improbable.

XML Sitemaps - In my experience XML sitemaps do not affect ranking or traffic for pages that were already registered. They are useful if you have a site with little or no PR that can't get its pages registered. According to your Quantcast rating and comparing with known data, you should be getting over a thousand visitors a day.

Traffic - you have had a traffic drop in the last year according to all measures, though nothing like 80%. There are probably many things you can do to improve traffic, but before "fixing" it radically, make sure it is really broken and how much. Are you getting less conversions?? You have had a slide over a year. Internet keeps growing, and you have to grow with it. Some ideas - Get rid of the Java menu which requires a plugin that lots of people don't have anyhow and put a dozen links on your main page. Make sure there is an html sitemap or maps that lists all the pages. Make sure that each and every page links back to main page with your keywords in the anchor text (not"home" or whatever. Add about 1000 words of text to main page (there is no such thing as optimum page size. Bigger = Better at least up to 64K) so Google has something interesting to index. Make sure the words "foot" and "show" and whatever else is important to you appears there. Check header for needless junk text, make sure the <Title></Title> of each page has ONE or two important keywords and nothing else, and keep adding to the site.
More tips:
SEO - Search Engine Optimization

[mawells]

There is a big difference between "visits" and "unique visitors" - has the number of "unique visitors" dropped as well? I have a site where the amount of "visits" has wide fluctuations, but the number of "unique visitors" hold steady. Check those numbers before panicking.

And, of course, bottom line is has sales dropped off significantly?

[kgun]

Originally Posted by Oman

Howdy,
On or about August 6th, our PR dropped from a 5 to a 3 and in Google Analytics, we went from an average(over the past 5 years) of 2,500 unique visitors per day to anywhere between 300 and 500 per day.

Why have so few commented on PR. The only I can see commenting on PR is:

Originally Posted by crankydave

Those pages might be on the cusp. Moving between the main index and the "other" one. I don't pay a whole lot of attention to TBPR but the drop you pointed out could be causing issues with what pages, and how many, are included in the main index.

Then this is a natural place to foccus attention. What caused that drop?

As some has indicated, you need a lot of tools to analyse your site. Some has been mentioned above. First and foremost all tools that Google supply and your log statistics. In addition you could analyse you site deeper by using:

1. Domain Tools: Whois Lookup and Domain Suggestions
2. YouGetSignal.com - A collection of uncomplicated, powerful network tools

If you don't find the solution to the problem, the drop is so dramatic that I would

1. Ask my hoster.
2. Ask Google (if they answer).

[villageloop]

I would have to agree with ami_iss above: Where is your analytics code on your homepage?
As a general rule, homepage gets the majority of traffic (of course their are exceptions).

Without proper analytics implementation, it will be hard to rely on the data that it is giving you.
Fix that first, then look at some of the other issues already indicated in the above posts.

There are many basic SEO priniples that can be implemented on your website right now, however your main question about the drop in traffic could just be a technical tracking issue.

I am not sure if you already answered this... (this is a long thread and I spent all morning reading it inbetween doing billable work)...
Have your overall Conversions & Sales dropped or significantly changed in correlation to your analytics?

[Oman]

Wow, thanks everybody for your comments and suggestions.

Jennywill - yup, we've got a unique IP address.

Duplicate content - We used to submit articles for use by other website. We often see our content being used on blogs. It's typically cited, but I certainly could see how it would appear as a duplicate to a bot. that's going to take a bit of work to get cleaned up.

Newsblaze - thanks. I'll check back in the previous posts. Thanks for taking the time to post such a thorough post.

Thanks ami_iss. I'm on it.

Maxwells - it was a big drop in unique visitors. 8-7 we had 2791, two days later...241. And it has stayed below 500 since then. We had a whopping 117 unique visitors yesterday.

Jeff
Myfootshop.com

[Oman]

Villageloop,

Interestingly, no, we haven't seen a large dip in our conversion rate. Sales are steady.

Jeff

[Cyrus255]

I think I found your problem. Please query "site:www.myfootshop.com" on google and you can see the problem yourself. Only 850 of 5,500 pages are not "sandboxed". This means google considers roughly 4,700 of your pages to be duplicates. Having 85% of your site's pages being duplicate will undoubtedly kill your rankings. How could such a thing happen?

Well, probably because you have not one, not two, not three, not even four, but FIVE duplicate copies of your large forums on google, that's just that I've seen so far, I keep discovering new copies of it.

Forum copy #1: myfootshop.com/discussion/
Forum copy #2: myfootshop.com/Discussion_OLD/
Forum copy #3: myfootshop.com/forums/
Forum copy #4: myfootshop.com/xq/ASP/ProductID.880/qx/Discussion/
EDIT (found another)
Forum copy #5: myfootshop.com/cgi-bin/ubb/ultimatebb.cgi?ubb=get_topic;f=3;t=000683 (one example page as I can't find the frontpage of it)

Those are 5 different ways google can see your forum as if it were five seperate forums. I would be willing to bet money that is the source of your troubles. You should DEFINITELY take care of that problem regardless. That is the largest duplicate content problem I've seen in a looong time (from a white hat site). Not to mention google has never been too fond of frames IMO. And to top off the duplicate content problem, you already stated you resubmit your articles to other websites, so that will add on some pain as well. However I wouldn't worry about that, I've done that and had at worst only 10% of my site sandboxed, not 85%.

Oh and despite whatever google says, it doesn't trust dynamic half as much as static, especially when you have tons of duplicate, dynamic, content that sends off tons of red flags at google.

[villageloop]

Originally Posted by Oman

Villageloop,

Interestingly, no, we haven't seen a large dip in our conversion rate. Sales are steady.

Jeff

Well then aside from the page ranking problem (duplicate content, etc...) which should be corrected and can only help you once it is, i would say the main problem that you have encountered with regards to analyitics is a technical one.
Add back the analytics code correctly and see what happens. (you should be able to see effects of this within 24 hours of adding the code)
At the same time start fixing the other issues such as submitting your sitemap.xml file and getting rid of duplicate content.

Good luck

[lpoulsen]

It seems to me that there are a lot of websites similar to yours, and yours is not particularly outstanding. As a person with type 2 diabetes, I decided to do a Google search for "diabetic foot care" which seems to be a need that you would want to serve. Google led me to lots of sites with good information, but yours did not come up. Noting that many of these sites were general medical information sites, I added the keyword "products" to my search, and still you did not come up.

Having browsed around your site a bit and having looked at the sites that Google did lead me to, I think that the sites they found were better (for me at least) than yours, so I cannot find any fault with their selections.

I noted that the search for "diabetic foot care" had a manually produced mini-index at the top of the results list, inviting specialization of the query "for pations", "for health care professionals", "causes and risk factors" etc. That indicates that someone at Google made an effort to steer users to the best available information (and yours was deemed not to be it). If that sub-index was created around the time that your traffic dropped, that may well be the cause of it.

[Oman]

Ipoulsen,

Good point. We're not focused on diabetes care. I do some clinical work with diabetics but my practice is more orthopedics. And the website is the same; fractures, sprains and sports medicine.

Jeff
Myfootshop.com

[full house]

it depends if the hosting drops consistently.

[Vaijero_Maya]

It might be the season. The trends appear more clearly after you take a deep look at your stats for more than two years. Also, check your uptime and speed (server). Had a similar problem and changed host, my traffic went up by almost 15%.

[Oman]

An update; I discovered a couple of simple simple issues. First, when we changed the border on our index page in August, the Google search code was left out. Got that fixed.

And the big one...a tour of Google Webmaster tools showed that we had no site map on file. Oh man. I've been in the habit of uploading a new site map every 4 weeks or so but had neglected to do so. Lesson learned.

Another thing I unearthed in my week of discovery was a new set of Google SEO guidlines. Good reading for us all.

The best news? Our visits this week rocketed from 400 to over 3000. It had to be the site map issue.

Thanks to all of you. Great suggestions and they're appreciated.

Jeff
Myfootshop.com

[villageloop]

Originally Posted by Oman

An update; I discovered a couple of simple simple issues. First, when we changed the border on our index page in August, the Google search code was left out. Got that fixed.

And the big one...a tour of Google Webmaster tools showed that we had no site map on file. Oh man. I've been in the habit of uploading a new site map every 4 weeks or so but had neglected to do so. Lesson learned.

Another thing I unearthed in my week of discovery was a new set of Google SEO guidlines. Good reading for us all.

The best news? Our visits this week rocketed from 400 to over 3000. It had to be the site map issue.

Thanks to all of you. Great suggestions and they're appreciated.

Jeff
Myfootshop.com

Why do you think the sitemap is the reason and not the fact that you were not actually tracking the results?
The truth is, if you didnt have the code on your pages, your visitors were still coming, you just were not recording that they were there.
If you had a physical store, and a person standing in front of the main door with a clicker in hand, tracking everytime a person walked through the door you would get a number a visitors to your store. If you had some smaller side entrances with clickers there also, you would be able to see every visitor who came in (although the majority came in through the front entrance)
If that person who worked your main front entrance forgot to come to work for a week, you would still have all of the visitors in your store, you just wouldnt have an accurate record of the total.

The sitemap is an issue which you needed to resolve, but your traffic shouldnt sky rocket 900% overnight by adding or updating your sitemap.xml file (although I wish it could )

[ami_iss]

Hey Jeffrey if you are still with us.
I'm with villageloop. I will go further. I have two sites with no xml sitemaps submitted It's too complicated to do it for sites with thousands of pages and they all get registered anyhow and some of them are #1 for keywords. Lots of sites don't submit any XML sitemaps. they are only important probably for very small sites that don't get linked anywhere.

If you have a Web log at bloglines and list your new pages there and discuss them, they will get registered in Google pretty fast. There are probably other such things you can do that will also get you some link juice which an xml sitemap does not.

If Alexa and Compete and Quantcast say you did not have a 90% traffic drop than you didn't. If your watch is broken it does not mean time stopped. Time kept going before there were watches. The visitors came, even if they were not recorded.

BUT - you just learned some things that are very important - 1) The meter code (whatever meter is used) has to be on every page - Every one! 2) Google analytics should be telling you where your visitors are going - reports show you a page by page breakdown if you like. If that is set up, you should be able to see if the meter was the problem, as there would be no visitors for the main page. If adding the meter to the front page made that much of a difference, then most of the visitors may be going to the front page, and you have to do something to get them to go to other pages as well. That is an entirely different problem, but an important one. The front page shouldn't account for more than 10% of your traffic. If it does, you have a problem.

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