My site's traffic just up and died on Friday. I don't know what happened but I have dropped from 150 uniques a day to around 30. Most of my traffic comes from Google and this is who isn't sending me traffic anymore. Google does not have me very high in any of the search results now. I used to be in the top 10 for a of Nintendo DS articles and Airmiles or Aeroplan points articles.

How can this happen all of a sudden? I'm not really sure, but I have some assumptions. A number of things have happened recently that might have caused it. Here we go...

1. The new PageRank came out. I went from a 1 to 2. This should mean more traffic I would think.
2. I was part of a RSS readership signup posting that increased by RSS readers from 20 to 41 as of today. I think this would have absolutely no effect with Google, unless the see all the links and figure my site is about something else.
3. I neglected to update my sitemap.xml file, which Google uses, for a week and a half. I'm assuming this is it. They also haven't indexed the site since April 28th. Maybe my site has lots authority because it does not look like it was updated, even though there were new articles every business day.
4. I notice the look and feel of the Google Webmaster pages have changed. Perhaps there were some major algorithm changes that affect my site. I have not read anything on other sites about traffic changes though.

Updating My Sitemap

My sitemap does not get updated regularly because I haven't automated it yet. I wrote my own simple blogging system as part of my project to learn PHP so some things are not automated like Wordpress is.

So my next little project is to automate the creation of the sitemap.xml file. Look for a post in the near future that provides a brief tutorial on how to do it for yourself.

Where To Go From Here

I will just keep doing the same thing. Writing content and reading other blogs. Hopefully things straighten out. It was interesting to see how much traffic I actually get from Google though. I knew I was getting 85% of it from there, but it doesn't really hit home until the source of my traffic decides to cut me off. My blog feels like it did 3 months ago.

I think I will look at developing some more traffic sources. I do get traffic from some of the other search engines, but only a little. My readership is way up, so hopefully that continues. I think it is time to go back and submit a few free articles to the article directions and receive the free linkbacks as well.

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Category: Blogging

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