The Day I Lost All My Google Traffic
February 14th, 2012 | Posted by in Web
ONE SMALL MISTAKE…
Since the day I became a blogger, I’ve been obsessed with every aspect of the craft. I surf blogging sites daily to learn new techniques I can apply to my websites. My obsession has paid off with steady traffic increases and a promising future…
I was happy with my progress… Until the day I lost everything.
I’ve read many horror stories about Google traffic. Before blogging, I associated words like Panda with the animal not the algorithm. People warned of the dreaded sandbox and what could happen to your traffic if you broke the rules.
When my traffic took a nose dive I feared the worst. But I never broke any rules so I couldn’t figure out what happened. What I did know was Google had de-indexed almost all of the pages including my home page. I frantically searched for my most popular posts but they were gone. Over 2.5 years of work was gone…
I felt hopeless and started thinking about what I could have done to deserve it. This site is free of adult content. I don’t duplicate content. I’m not a part of any link farms and I don’t stuff my content with keywords. The site loads relatively fast and I spend a lot of time making sure 404 errors and broken links are fixed.
I also found this page: 25 reasons why Google hates your blog.
None of them apply to this blog. So what happened?
Ironically, it was Google who helped me in the end. I logged into their amazing Webmaster tools and there it was. Like a punch in the face. A critical error. Robots.txt was missing. For people who aren’t aware, robots.txt is a file that tells search engines which pages to crawl on your site. When it went missing, Google just assumed I didn’t want my content indexed. I was devastated and immediately replaced it with a new one.
2 things were racing through my head.
First, I realized that it was my fault all along. When I rebuilt 17west.ca I must have been trigger happy when I was deleting old files and directories.
Second, I had no idea how long it would take for my precious Google traffic to return.
WHAT DOES ALL THIS HAVE TO DO WITH A MOVIE BLOG?
This incident made me realize how much I love writing about movies, screenwriting & independent film. I didn’t want it to end. I wanted my traffic back. The idea of rebuilding everything was daunting, exhausting and horrifying.
Honestly, I would have never given up. I would have stuck with it and rebuilt my traffic slowly if I had indeed done something wrong. (Thankfully I hadn’t) But I was demoralized.
The next day I noticed that Google had added my pages again. Traffic slowly returned. By day two my traffic had returned to normal and that was that.
The crisis was over. I’m lucky it was my stupid mistake instead of something serious. But I’ll be vigilant from now on and Webmaster tools will be first on my list the next time I have a problem.
Whew…
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sounds like the same thing that just happened to me, as you describe it I know I need to get robot.txt and hopefully my traffic goes back to normal, I have been posting like crazy and the drop in traffic has been depressing, now I need to figure out how to write robot.txt
Google has a robot text generator I think but you can pretty much search for a basic one online pretty easily. Hope it comes back quickly!