This is really strange. Perhaps I’ve not been blogging for awhile, but to find the website traffic dropped suddenly is certainly disconcerting. Sure this website is mostly a blogging website in nature. It’s always nice to see lots of traffic despite the high bounce rate. Never expected the traffic to suddenly tank!
Checking out a few forums, found out that some webmasters also experience sudden drop in website traffic, then after about a month, their website traffic is back to normal again. They couldn’t figure out what was the reason for the sudden drop.
Like most website, the main source of traffic is from Google search, and Google is constant revising, and changing their algorithm, so my guess is that they must have change something, or testing out something. Whatever it is, I certainly hope my website traffic would be back to normal in future.
There is nothing much I can do about, but to continue building up my website. Continue to provide good quality content because that’s what people are searching for.
Website is not built solely for the web crawlers (although in part it is) but the main thing has always been to build good solid content that would be useful for the general masses.
Will have to wait and see what happens.
Update 11/8/2009
Finally found out what happen. Nothing to do with Google messing around with their algorithm. Somehow the WordPress widget was not working and causing the rest of the page not to load. If the web page won’t load all the way to the footer where the analytics are located, then it wouldn’t register as a visit in the analytics. No idea why the widget is causing problem. I also noticed the WordPress will not update to new version. So perhaps there was some corruption in the WordPress installation. So I decided to install a fresh one over it. Still no go. The widget is really acting weird. So the workaround was to get rid of the widget codes and revert back to old style WordPress template, which seems to work. I can see the statistic rolling in again. Phew! And I thought I was sandboxed by Google. Now only thing is to figure out just what happen to WordPress widget…
Can I know which widget you’re talking about, pls?
I’m having issues with my WordPress blog as well. Recently installed Platinum SEO and Google XML Sitemap Builder.
Which widget was causing the issues?
I have no idea which widget caused the problem. Could be a corrupted WordPress installation or a buggy website theme. Since I build the WordPress theme myself there might be errors in the coding of the theme.