BellaOnline Forums Career Business Coach Google shake-up?

I posted this on the computer forum too but I'm on this one more so wanted to ask here too if anyone had noted a drop in traffic for May? I mean a severe drop?

My traffic has dropped by about 50%. My google adsense earnings have mostly stayed the same-thank goodness- but my best pages are barely getting any traffic.

A friend sent me a thread from webmaster's world (a pay site so I can't ask questions) that said Google had a big shake up in rankings, etc and everybody is dropping like rocks. Nobody is sure what it means or what to do.

My question is, has anyone been through one of these before and if so, what do you do? Start over trying to get traffic, like in the beginning? Doing free articles, forums, etc? All my links are still out there so not sure that would do any good.

May is an extremely active month for families. Children are graduating from highschool, end of year parties, proms, getting started on vacations, etc.

So It would not surprise me if trsaffic were down.

Also, if you are talking about shops, a lot of people just paid taxes, and then those that had extensions are up, too.

I know that rebate everybody got back was supposed to make people spend more, but most everybody I know was putting it toward bills, not buying anything new.

I know my traffic is usually down in the summer but this was a significant, overnight drop which others were also talking about experiencing.

I've taken into account all the usual reasons for traffic being down and this is outside that.

Someone on webmasters said that google was going to switch from SEO ranking to adwords ranking-in other words whoever pays the most gets the ranking. I feel that the public will sooner or later catch on to the fact tho that Google is ranking sites according to how much money they pay, as opposed to ranking sites by those who provide the best information.

My husband works for Google. They are always working to improve their technology (my words, not his) and their search information is updated daily. They are NOT (his words restated by me) putting their paying clients on the top of searches.

I found this link (my husband is out with our children right now so I can get more info later)... that explains how it all works.

BellaOnline ALERT: Raw URLs are not allowed in these forums for security reasons. Please use UBB code. If you don't know how to do UBB code just post here for help - we will help out!

Thanks Lisa, another friend told me also that Google wants to provide the best info possible so won't be putting the paying customers first.

A friend and mentor of mine with a very successful website told me that Google will frequently do major algorithm changes and some sites rise and some fall through this. Sometimes these shifts last for weeks or months and then they change things back - or not.

Her advise was to do nothing to my site except keep adding pages and promoting it as always and then start a new, completely unrelated site so as to weather future changes the better.

Does your husband know if something like that has happened recently?

An odd thing is my earnings so far have been unaffected. I'm getting less traffic but more paying customers. Hope THAT keeps up at least.

glad to hear your earnings haven't gone down!

I'm still just writing and not even thinking about "making money", and I certainly don't have the tech understanding that my husband (nor half the bella folks have) has.

He did say that they do those configurations on a weekly basis.

You want to make sure your material is long enough to get noticed by Google, that other sites are pointing to you and/or connecting to you and that you have as many key words as possible in your search terms.

Do you use Google AdWords? If so, be sure and go crazy with words and try interesting associations. For example, my husband made a suggestion to a friend who was writing a book on flight schools to use words like "airplane books", use other authors names, famous flight manuals, cities or airline names.
He said the main thing is to check your reports daily so you can keep track of what works and what doesn't work and make the necessary changes. That's what most people fail to do.

He also suggested this link for help optimizing your website.
www.google.com/webmaster

He is out of town but when I speak to him - I'll ask for more info if it helps.

Those are helpful links, thank-you. By a strange co-incidence lately I typed a site into google search that I knew existed - I had referred to it only recently but forgotten to add it to favorites! Google didn't find it! Dismayed - I did something I never do - tried another search engine! Live Search found it! It was at that point I started to wonder about google. I must say I am still using it though.My own site sharing my Diary of Writing For The Internet comes up just fine - thank goodness those earnings have not gone down.

Thanks for the tips.

A friend told me that if you sign up for adwords and direct the campaign to a page that has adsense on it, it can get you dropped from adsense-for artificially trying to point traffic to an adsense page. As most of my site has adense, I'd have to be careful about that.

I've had my site optimized for the 2 years I've been building it. I'm also a freelance writer and have written seo articles for many websites.

That's very interesting that you went to look for a page and it wasn't there suddenly. My best performing page on apple cider vinegar disappeared in a similar fashion. I was getting 30-40 hits a day and suddenly not one. I went to check the google indexing on it and discovered it "was not found." It's nowhere on the first 5 pages of a goggle search, which is as far as I looked. It used to be on the first page.

I do use other search engines all the time but google is the one where you need to have your site indexed. A good portion of my traffic came from google in my statistics but now almost nothing from them. The others are the same so that is where my traffic is now coming from.

Lisa, I'd be interested to know what you husband has to say about the recent issues.
Joan

Joan -

As far as the green PR bar that is in several toolbars, including google's - that isn't updated in real time - It's based on information that is months old.

If your traffic, however has dropped - I'm wondering what your Analytics say. (If you're not using Google Analytics or another form of analyzing traffic - I suggest starting - the information is a crucial learning tool.)

I've had one site that dropped 3 PR points, and another that gained 2. So I can't adhere to the notion that "everybody" is dropping like flies.

Traffic plays a minor role in PR. What plays more of a factor is current links. Are you supplying content that is so valuable that people other than you will link to it? That effects PR.

What is effecting your traffic? I can't say for sure, as I haven't had my company analyze your site. Could it be that you haven't been networking as much as you did before? Or that where you're listing for your keywords has dropped (replaced by competitors?)

I've been learning a lot about how the big three search engines see websites - Now. Most of the information and "experts" out there are using data that is years old.

If my readers want - I'll put together an at-cost package for analyzing your current site with a special "Bella Only" price. I don't want to be breaking my own forum rules - so send me a PM, if you're interested. If I get 10 requests - I'll do a deal for all of you, that you can afford (and that still allows my staff to get paid!)

Any more questions?

Meg

Thanks for the input Meg. I do use the analytics on Homestead, which is where my site is located. I'm going to add google analytics to it tho, which is what I have on my blog.

After looking a a few days traffic, it seems that one particular page has dropped off the google indexing. When I check for indexing, it says page not found. It was on page one of google's search before and I got about 30 visitors per day to that one page. If I adjust for that page, the rest of my traffic isn't that far down from what it was.

I know at this time of year traffic falls off and that continues through the summer for the most part. Not sure how the economy is playing into this either, as my google earnings are way down some days, where it had been really steady. I don't make a ton of money with my site but I'd been making steady progress until the past week or so.

As you say, some people's traffic goes up while others go down during these things.

Could you tell me where I can download a toolbar to give PR ratings? I had one on my toolbar with my computer that crashed on New Years but couldn't find another one to put on my new one or remember how I came up with that one.