But is there a way to deal with i?

Sure you can work it out.

I will update this with a new post in the morning – but yes, traffic rebounded wonderfully!

I pulled the webmaster tools code – and relocated the auction bar.

Traffic took about 2-3 days to come back, but it came back with purpose, and the site is busier than ever now! (Had the highest volume week, last week)

I will post it up tomorrow.

Mark

Can you provide an update on this topic? I’d like to know if your stats continued to go down, level off or rise back up. Did you make any changes according to what analytics was providing?

Are you using it in conjunction any sites you build with the N1WAY.

or shoot me an email.

I find myself having some of these reactions myself. We don’t question the big positive jumps – we earned those! – but when the drops come, we’re sure something nefarious is responsible. I know it isn’t pleasant to think about, but it may be the big traffic increase was actually the fluke.

keep on, keeping on. your posts are always thought provoking. thanks.

I know a 3-4 week span is kind of a tight timeframe to measure anything meaningful. Much of the sdrop also occured over the last week of June and into the first week of July, traditionally, the highest vacation month of the year.

The key thing that triggered my concern, was the large gap in google referred traffic during the same time.

Up to that point, G was referring roughly 64% of the search generated traffic, the rest being split among several others. In the drop weeks above, G referrals were down in the 40% range… which led me to them.

I DO agree whole heartedly that 2-4 weeks of stats dont tell the overall picture though, for sure!

Mark

That decrease in QS is sure to result in an increase in ad spend shortly!! Watch out for the G in your wallet!

in ref to changes… No. I am not pulling down the site or making any significant changes for now. I DID pull down the very prominent link menu I had built, and replaced with a simple hover menu int he main navigation bar instead.

Aside from that – I removed the site from GWT…

I assume it will take a full week or two to see what effect the changes may have, but the steady declines in daily traffic have stopped, and it now holds a steady flow again.

Who knows, Maybe I just plugged a leak that will eventually drop off again… Next week will tell the rest of the story.

M

reading some of the other comments makes me think about a few things. On July 7th I got a major slap which took out a lot (like 75%)of my sites that had been running adwords great for over a year (like 20% CTR). They still rank ok, for some words… but adwords has decreased the QS to 1.
I have also recently began recently using that new keyword suggest tool in google (as well as putting in GWT)… not sure if its related..(but as I relaunch I will be sure not to touch either). but I am starting to think it is. Funny enough they skipped a few out of the box thin BANS sites.. but took out my wordpress/bans sites instead…

Double check your sites, the word auction probably killed you…and google is definately following those no -follow, no spider links, probably by they killer robot (Since that is the first place a real spammer would hide his stuff — I mean its so blantanly obvious, since only a skilled webmaster would do it.).\

Here is a question for you.
Did you shut down the exisitng site, relaunch on a new domain, with the old content.. minus GWT and the auction stuff.

I just registered 5 new domains for another project and think I will not even think of adding to GWT.

Maybe web masters should push other so called search engines on their sites and smack back at Google.

A search engine should index all sites on the net, not just the ones they feel are worthy, let the end web surfer decide what they like or do not like.