I noticed a strange drop in traffic across many forums.
- Thread starter jonsidneyb
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Moshe1010
Well-known member
jonsidneyb
Well-known member
It all checks out fine.
Have looked a lot of forums, many were not affected but a whole bunch took a dive all at the same time. I don't think it is a coincident.
jonsidneyb
Well-known member
Both show it as good but checkit.php says there is a message but I am not sure how to get to it.
jonsidneyb
Well-known member
I have those turned off. That would not have made my downward fall happen in lockstep with a bunch of others.
jonsidneyb
Well-known member
What ever happened to me started after Jan 19th. I know people are going to say that this is not accurate but when I check it it does mirror what we were seeing and the reason I checked.
This site started out it's decline the same day.
Again this makes sense comparing it to my internal numbers. These are visits, when I compare them to registrations and log in's the timing is there.
woei
Well-known member
Do you understand why people say those stats are not accurate?
It's too bad you did not use analytics before, because they provide good information about visitors from search machines and returning visitors. Is there a competitor? What if you search on topics that are on your forum and on what result they are in google? I think you might have lost traffic from search engines.
The hosting company you're with, don't they provide stats in there control panel? We need information about your vistors, the development of the rate of visitors coming from search engines. That might give some information about what is happening.
And please, really try to understand why you can't rely on those statistics from similar web. We want to help you, but you have to trust us when we advise you in this.
It's too bad you did not use analytics before, because they provide good information about visitors from search machines and returning visitors. Is there a competitor? What if you search on topics that are on your forum and on what result they are in google? I think you might have lost traffic from search engines.
The hosting company you're with, don't they provide stats in there control panel? We need information about your vistors, the development of the rate of visitors coming from search engines. That might give some information about what is happening.
And please, really try to understand why you can't rely on those statistics from similar web. We want to help you, but you have to trust us when we advise you in this.
jonsidneyb
Well-known member
I am pretty sure it has to do with search engines. The competitor struggles to get 12 posts a day and that has not changed. On the information internal to the forum I can see the drop off.
The reason I still look at the other information is that there are some things that seem consistent with what the forum shows internally. The internal information actually shows the number of posts on a sight rise though we are getting almost no new members.
I never worried about analytical tools because I actually never expected the forum to grow in the first place. It just did, I never did anything to grow it. It was just startling to see the sudden decline.
Even if the numbers on those other sites might not be accurate I can confirm that they are having fewer people online as well. I am a member of many of them. All are not affected but the ones that show the decline on the other sites is also happening in real life.
jonsidneyb
Well-known member
I have learned to believe things I see more than what I am told because so much that people tell me turns out to be wrong so I gravitate to things that I can find some evidence for. Why is the data from simalarweb not accurate?
When I asked about the huge number of people that had not replied to the activation email I was told that it was spammers, it turned out only about 1/4-1/5 were spammers. I dug and started looking at them individually, I found what it was that we had been blacklisted because of bouncing of non-active or throwaway email addresses with subscriptions.
I do listen to what people say but I don't trust everything until I see evidence.
When I asked about the huge number of people that had not replied to the activation email I was told that it was spammers, it turned out only about 1/4-1/5 were spammers. I dug and started looking at them individually, I found what it was that we had been blacklisted because of bouncing of non-active or throwaway email addresses with subscriptions.
I do listen to what people say but I don't trust everything until I see evidence.
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jonsidneyb
Well-known member
I will check to see if I have that.
I can see just by looking at the forum that it is in decline. I have not seen the forum drop below 1000 guests during all of 2013. It is well below that now.
jonsidneyb
Well-known member
Something is showing on Google An. Saturday March 22, 28572 visits.
Moshe1010
Well-known member
Yeah, that doesn't help you since you can't compare it with historical data. Google will track your website's info from now and on, but to know the exact reason why is your forum have such a big decline is not really something that you can solve without data. I guess just leave it for few more days and see what happens since you don't really have options in my opinion. I would turn on Facebook/Google/Twitter registration since it makes higher registration/login rates. You can also encourage people to register by limiting the amount of threads they can view, and then force them to register in order to keep entering to new threads (this increased my registration by 300%). There is a free add-on for that in the resource manager and it doesn't have any effect on search engines (since they don't use cookies).
jonsidneyb
Well-known member
That will mean I will have to close the forum in a heart beat.
I have a store and people assumed the forum was my marketplace. It wasn't, my main marketplace was going underground with the NSS people, the people that make maps of caves. When I opened the forum manufacturers started to that the forum was my marketplace and sent shills.
Much to my surprise I learned some things the hard way. Before I opened the forum I was never turned down for inventory once. After I opened the forum when I would contact a manufacturer they would join the forum and wouldn't sell to me. They would just farm the forum. We put a stop to that finally but then they would resort to pretending to be customers. Some where quite candid when I tried to buy from them telling me they were getting everything they wanted from the forum.
We have to screen for manufacturers and that is a huge job. When I did the facebook thing it became a manufacturer magnet.
Not being able to pick up manufacturers after they thought the forum was my only marketplace made me homeless. Facebook scares me to death.
If the flood of manufacturers were to happen again I would be out of business fast. It is better for me to close the forum than do that.
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CTXMedia
Well-known member
If you're inclined to think that changes at Google are the result of the downturn in figures, then you need to look at any changes you may have made yourself, such as adding a portal (changes the frontpage content), moving to a different domain (although I don't think this applies in your case), change site/forum title or description (so your results become targetted at a different audience), etc. - or if not, what may have changed at Google to affect how your results are displayed and ranked?
I don't know your forum, in fact I didn't even know what it was about - I had to investigate what EDC meant and even doing a check of indexed content at Google (site:edcforums.com) I still couldn't work out what your site was about from the title and description:
EDCForums
Introduced November 2013. The Founder's Briefcase is the result of some deep meditations on both the past and the future of outdoor gear. Its myriad of useful ...
Looking at the title and key words in your site description it might get hits for yoga (meditiations), outdoor gear (partly relevant?), briefcases (business user carry gear), but there's a lot of that description which is not useful from an SEO perspective and could be better written to attract a more targetted audience. It's worth considering.
Now it could be that you've gone along fine for years and the various changes at Google haven't impacted your site - but this time might be different; this time your site may have been dropped along with lots of others because of a change in Google's ranking for certain types of sites, and the best way to find out how that may have happened is, ironically, to search Google for people in a similar position to see what they've discovered (many of whom will have the historical data and be used to analysing it).
Actually, looking at your site, the description appears to be coming from the first article on your homepage News section:
Presumably any changes to the primary article will reflect in your site description in Google - perhaps you might want to look at adding a site description meta tag to avoid this so instead of having a changing description, you have a fixed, keyword rich one!
For example, the previous news article in October was about iPad protection - a popular, and presumably very relevant, search phrase for your site.
When did you install the portal/news front page?
Cheers,
Shaun
I don't know your forum, in fact I didn't even know what it was about - I had to investigate what EDC meant and even doing a check of indexed content at Google (site:edcforums.com) I still couldn't work out what your site was about from the title and description:
EDCForums
Introduced November 2013. The Founder's Briefcase is the result of some deep meditations on both the past and the future of outdoor gear. Its myriad of useful ...
Looking at the title and key words in your site description it might get hits for yoga (meditiations), outdoor gear (partly relevant?), briefcases (business user carry gear), but there's a lot of that description which is not useful from an SEO perspective and could be better written to attract a more targetted audience. It's worth considering.
Now it could be that you've gone along fine for years and the various changes at Google haven't impacted your site - but this time might be different; this time your site may have been dropped along with lots of others because of a change in Google's ranking for certain types of sites, and the best way to find out how that may have happened is, ironically, to search Google for people in a similar position to see what they've discovered (many of whom will have the historical data and be used to analysing it).
Actually, looking at your site, the description appears to be coming from the first article on your homepage News section:
Presumably any changes to the primary article will reflect in your site description in Google - perhaps you might want to look at adding a site description meta tag to avoid this so instead of having a changing description, you have a fixed, keyword rich one!
For example, the previous news article in October was about iPad protection - a popular, and presumably very relevant, search phrase for your site.
When did you install the portal/news front page?
Cheers,
Shaun
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woei
Well-known member
Ok, please work methodically because I think your really stressed about this (which I can totally understand).
First step, you have a webhoster. Your webhoster should have some stats? Can you ask or look into them?
Second, the difference between using things like google analytics or statistics from your own hoster is because they are measured with a special plugin or at the server side. Similarweb uses a technique based on an user panel, which can't give the same kind of accuracy. They also explain it on their own website: https://similarweb.uservoice.com/kn...is-the-data-on-similarweb-sometimes-different
Third step: A lot of your traffic is coming in through search engines, about 70% in the last 3 months according through similarweb (I'm using this because this is for me the only thing where we have some data from). Please figure out if the number of visitors from search engines have dropped. Google is know for changing their algorithms and it's a black box how your rankings are calculated. For instance, if your main keyword is like everydaycary and when you search it with google, it could have been that before the change you would be the first result on the first page. Now it could be if you search you only show up on the second page. That can make a huge difference.
But please try and believe us when we say to use a proper solution for analysing your statistics, to use a program that is based with a plugin on your webpages or that is based on your webserver logs. Those are the only ones that are really accurate.
First step, you have a webhoster. Your webhoster should have some stats? Can you ask or look into them?
Second, the difference between using things like google analytics or statistics from your own hoster is because they are measured with a special plugin or at the server side. Similarweb uses a technique based on an user panel, which can't give the same kind of accuracy. They also explain it on their own website: https://similarweb.uservoice.com/kn...is-the-data-on-similarweb-sometimes-different
Third step: A lot of your traffic is coming in through search engines, about 70% in the last 3 months according through similarweb (I'm using this because this is for me the only thing where we have some data from). Please figure out if the number of visitors from search engines have dropped. Google is know for changing their algorithms and it's a black box how your rankings are calculated. For instance, if your main keyword is like everydaycary and when you search it with google, it could have been that before the change you would be the first result on the first page. Now it could be if you search you only show up on the second page. That can make a huge difference.
But please try and believe us when we say to use a proper solution for analysing your statistics, to use a program that is based with a plugin on your webpages or that is based on your webserver logs. Those are the only ones that are really accurate.
jonsidneyb
Well-known member
Presumably any changes to the primary article will reflect in your site description in Google - perhaps you might want to look at adding a site description meta tag to avoid this so instead of having a changing description, you have a fixed, keyword rich one!
For example, the previous news article in October was about iPad protection - a popular, and presumably very relevant, search phrase for your site.
When did you install the portal/news front page?
Cheers,
Shaun
The Portal is I think at least six months old. For a long time I actually wanted to slow the growth rate down maybe 10%, but not by 70%. I really have not had time to do much with the portal.
One of my problems is I am working very long days and anytime I do A I am not working on B.
EDC is about things people carry every day but but definition has strayed a bit, I actually prefer the catchall it used to be. Manufacturers make products with EDC in the name. It usually appliers to things a bit smaller so it can be carried more easily.
The term EDC is actually a bit old. What you grandmother carried in her purse was her Every Day Carry.
If you google EDC comb you will get hits.
We are about portability.
Pocket knives to pocket lint.
Maybe I should ditch the portal page.
Here it is mentioned on yahoo, someone Down Under is concerned about his EDC.
http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20140207231417AAXYnAr
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jonsidneyb
Well-known member
I have not made any changes in probably 6 months, the last real change was the landing page.
I wonder if the first article should be a definition of of what the forum is about.
jonsidneyb
Well-known member
http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.co.at/2009/09/google-does-not-use-keywords-meta-tag.html
This says they don't use meta tags for ranking.
This says they don't use meta tags for ranking.
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