Web Blog of Greg Mathews

In my last post I mentioned that in January Google basically dropped one of my sites from their index. Well it has happened again. I do not know what is happening nor how long it will last for.

Currently Google says there are 103,000 pages indexed from my site but once you start browsing through the Google results for my site it drops from 103,000 to 80 pages in the google index. On Friday just gone, the 103,000 was about right, 1000 of the pages where in the main index with the rest (older out of date) where in the supplimental index. Yesturday (Saturday) that dropped to just 43 pages in the main index and none in the supplimental. Today it has crept up to 80 but still a small percentage of what it should be.

I use the Google Sitemaps and that contains about 140,000 urls and has no errors but the google bot, although crawling my site, is not crawling the pages in my sitemap but crawling my javascript files.

How is this effecting my traffic? drastically to be frank. For the 7 days prior to this happening, almost 80% of my traffic orriginated from Google, yesturday (when the site was dropped) that dropped to about 60%, today it has dropped to about 3%

My traffic peaked this week at around 80,000 impressions in a day, with an average of around 55,000/day for the month of March up until Friday. Yesturday I had a mere 10,000 page impressions and today it looks like it will be about 5000 impressions. You can imagine the effect this has had on my advertising/adsense revenue.

The question is - Should I pannic?

Well in January I did, I made changes to my site thinking they would improve the situation but they had very little effect and I found that other sites had experienced the same problem. About 2 weeks later everything appeared good and the site was fully indexed in google and my adsense/advertising revenue was on the up again.

The difference this time is that I have heard very few reports of this happening elsewhere, but I don’t beleive the site has been blocked from the google SERPS as my adsense account is still active. Surely if Google doesn’t like my site for any particular reason they would have asked me to remove adsense from it?

I have decided to do nothing for the next few days, it will hurt my pocket more now than it did in January as the site is more popular but if I do make changes I could make things worse. I will update on here in the next few days to let you know the outcome.