Strange traffic - panda, penguin? Screenshots attached.
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Hi,
I'm unsure if I've been hit by penguin/panda. I've attached screenshots below. The first one is April 1st to today. The second is all of April and the 3rd is 1st June to today. The site was offline at the beginning of July which explains no traffic. My traffic took a dip though on April 6th which as I understand it wasn't a panda/penguin roll out? I then got hardly any traffic for May to mid June. Then the site was offline due to a server problem but when it came back on traffic was the highest it has ever been. Today however I am getting zero search engine traffic?
I can't figure out what's going on. Can anyone shed any light on the issue?
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The directory /feed/ is for your RSS, this wont cause site wide drops in traffic so that isn't the problem.
If you have an RSS go to { http://www.yourdomain.com/feed/ }
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In webmaster tools I have 5 access denied to urls that end in /feed/
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As long as it is in the header.php and that header appears on every page of your site your ok.
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I am using Wordpress and have analytics code installed in the header. Is that right?
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Have you checked the source of traffic in your analytics report? That should be able to explain a lot.
Are you tracking SERPs (rank positions) for your site?
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Thanks for your reply. I suppose it could possible be the 3rd April update. However that wouldn't explain how the traffic returns even stronger in July.
The site was offline for about 10 days. I do see search terms related to the click and have been receiving enquiries which leads me to believe the traffic sent is genuine.
All the pages are indexed in google but as of this morning I am getting no traffic whatsoever. As you can see apart from the site downtime I have always got a few clicks every day from long tail keywords. (just to confirm the site is up and working fine today but no traffic).
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This looks like it could be a code issue, have you made sure that the analytic code is inserted correctly in either your header or footer. If you are 100% happy that you have it inserted correctly can you check through another source to see if you are getting traffic from them Bing or yahoo will do.
If Bing and Yahoo are producing traffic this might suggest that there is an issue with Google accessing your site, check your robots.txt to make sure that it isn't blocking Google accessing certain content.
Also check your keywords and indexed pages to see if they have dropped with your traffic.
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Hiya,
Please look at the following link to find out the chronology of updates made by Google:
http://www.seomoz.org/google-algorithm-change
I see an update that happened on 3rd April; this could possibly explain the dip in your site traffic in the 1st week of April.
Coming to your 2nd question, how long was your site offline? Do you see any indexed items of your website in Google?
Finally, for the spiked traffic in July, do you see any organic traffic details such as the keywords etc.? It could very well be malicious code or script that could be generating false views/hits on your site.
Thanks,
Rajesh Dhawan
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