Anybody else had an 80% drop in traffic in the last few days?
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80% drop in traffic since 10 November. No sign of rebound, yet.
The blog I need help with is: (visible only to logged in users)
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I have too and it’s stayed down. I’ve asked WP for help but haven’t received any response. I’m kind of relieved to hear it isn’t just me. I’m at sleeplessthought.wordpress.com.
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Hi, sleeplessdave
How’s your traffic? Has it come back toward normal at all? And any response from WordPress yet?
I got an email response to a message sent to support@wordpress.com after 5 days, but I failed to open it until today. For some reason, my communications with WordPress via email are being sent to my social mail box, not primary where I would like them to go.
Anyway, my issues were really addressed. The responder suggested that 404 errors might be to blame. Really? Who would have ever guessed? And suggested that I try connecting Google+ to my WordPress account I guess. I’ll look into that. May help.
I’ve had a couple of significant drops in traffic since early October:
- 31.4% over the two week period 14 October-3 November
- 79% from 10 November to 15 November
There was a small rebound from the first of the two declines, and a larger rebound from the second, but my traffic is presently averaging (for the past week) 40-45% lower than it was in early October.
The total drop from the average in early October to the lowest ebb on 15 November was about 80%. This was particular unusual because the site’s traffic historically grows from August to November or mid-December, and was in the process of doing so this year until an unexpected, and unexplained drop beginning in mid-October.
There may be an explanation for the very steep drop beginning on 11 November. Late on 9 November, I had changed my “Reading” setting from “Allow search engines to index this site” to “Discourage search engines from indexing this site”. I’d done this many times in the past for short periods without noticing much of an effect.
One of the things I’d noticed is that, for some unknown reason, making this modification sometimes gives a boost to the traffic for a day or two. And sure enough the traffic did jump on the 10th, the day after the change. Began falling on the second day, steeply, but I’d forgotten that I’d made the change so I didn’t change the setting back until the 15th. I’d never seen that change in the setting have anywhere near such a dramatic effect on the traffic. In fact, I’d left it for about ten days or more earlier this year (if I recall correctly) with minimal effect, maybe a 10 or 15% drop. I’ll try to explain next time why I would make such a setting modification. Too tired right now. It’s late.
Perhaps Google has improved their response rate to such modifications.
I will mention briefly that in addition to these recent trends the site has performed poorly for most of the past year. The present daily or weekly average is roughly 1/3 what it was one year ago. Reasons have thus far escaped me.
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I appreciate you sharing that with me. I had a massive drop in August and made most of those changes then, but this time I’m just kind of baffled because I haven’t changed anything at all from the way I had it set it last time. Who knows? I know people WITHIN wordpress read it, but I don’t think it gets out to search engines any more and that’s just kind of frustrating. Blerg. At least the holidays are coming and I can try to convince myself I’ve gone from 200 to 30 hits a day for that reasonl lol.
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You might want to try something like Statcounter to analyze the traffic. The free version only gives detailed information on hourly visits, and on each visit (visitor location, visited page, length of visit, etc.), for the last 18 hours, but it there are daily, weekly, monthly, and yearly graphs beyond that.
I used to use it a lot, but don’t have the time anymore.
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