Feedback Serious Problems for SeriousCompacts.com

Amin

Hall of Famer
As many of you know, this site is ad supported, and most of the revenue comes from search traffic. Our Google search traffic, which represents about 99% of our total search traffic, took an abrupt nosedive on October 29, 2012:

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All of a sudden, none of our content is ranking high in Google searches anymore. I have no idea why this happened. Don't even know where to begin.

Google Webmaster Tools hasn't directed any malware on the site. Some sites running this forum software (vBulletin) have been the victim of redirect exploits, which take people who click on Google search results for site content and redirect them to some other site. Google penalizes sites which redirect in this way, but no one has reported such activity to me. Has anyone here noticed anything unusual?
 
I have not noticed anything erratic with the site but I haven't been on much as of late. I do know that Google was doing some kind of optimization. Is your metadata still in tact Amin? If it is then that would lower your overall hits and thus the ad traffic. If your tagging is fine then you can relist with Google to see if that helps. Additionally I would list with Bing and Yahoo and any major search engine as you want the traffic from those places too. And that's my two cents that might only be worth two cents but it's been a few years since I ran any sites and had to do any of that.
 
oh WOW that chart is NUTS!!! theres GOTTA be something wonky!

i havent noticed anything weird
but ill start doing some google searches for m43 stuff thru the day and click the links for here n see what happens
 
Some good basic advice on how Google works and how to avoid pitfalls.

How to Deal With Panda, Penguin and Other Google Algorithm Changes - PC Advisor

What other site data can you share, i.e., Pages Per Visit, Time on Site, % Mobile Users, etc... Did they see any changes at the same time?

If you have a lot of mobile traffic, for example, but are getting a lot of bounces (people not choosing to visit the site) when people get the invite for the App, that probably does not look good to Google.

The good news is that it's probably something that is fixable. The bad news is that it may take some time to start to climb back up the ranks again.
 
I can't find anything that has changed other than the drop in search traffic and lower ranking of our content in search results. Nothing changed in terms of pages per visit, time on site, % mobile users, etc, prior to Oct 29th. I'm guessing Google is penalizing the site for something. I just wish they would notify me as to what is going on. I've no problem waiting patiently for things to improve, but I can't fix what I don't know to be broken.
 
I know absolutely nothing about google or managing a web site but I've found that the pages don't always load, they "stick" and if it does finally load then you can 't access any of the links to actually look at anything. This happens on my iMac and iPad.
 
One would think that since Google pays out for your services (delivering eyes and clicks to their ads) that they could be a little more helpful. Sounds frustrating and that graph is major YIKES! I wish I knew stuff about these types of things. Is the same thing going on at mu-43 and NEXTalk?
 
Well, I just clicked on ad for the think tank and the website welcome by saying "Welcome friend of Mu-43.com" even though the ad I clicked on was on the SC website. Are the clicks being attributed to the wrong website? I don't know how this stuff works....just reporting my findings. I would assume there would be a correlating spike of activity on the Mu-43 site, but maybe the traffic over there is so heavy you wouldn't even notice a little blip.
 
A quick search for 'serious compacts' and 'rx100 forum' had this site as the 1st link.

Did you look for any of the other forums? Ricoh GXR is 4th on the first page, some others weren't on the first page and I eventually went looking for the Pentax K-01 forum just as an example, the first mention of mu-43 was on page 13 and for serious compacts it was page 24!

Life's too short to go looking for any others, but maybe they are also a long way down the list. By far the most references were to dpreveiw, perhaps 95% at a guess.

Barrie
 
I know absolutely nothing about google or managing a web site but I've found that the pages don't always load, they "stick" and if it does finally load then you can 't access any of the links to actually look at anything. This happens on my iMac and iPad.

Yes, I found that this can happen too and it has been like it for a few weeks now. Today, clearly, I'm not having a problem though!
 
I know absolutely nothing about google or managing a web site but I've found that the pages don't always load, they "stick" and if it does finally load then you can 't access any of the links to actually look at anything. This happens on my iMac and iPad.

Christina, thanks for pointing this out. I think it's the key to what has happened here. I checked Google Webmaster tools and found that server errors spiked on 10/27/12 and have persisted ever since. Here's the graphic for Mu-43, which is on the same server:

2012-11-14_0527.png


That happened right after I asked our hosting company to lower the minimum search length for My SQL. Something about that change must have resulted in these server errors, and Google is responding to the server errors by killing off traffic to the site. I've got to get the host to address this, and hopefully Google will restore our traffic when the errors get better. Thanks for your help!
 
I would suggest not to panic too soon.
I have several websites. My latest website suddenly plunged like yours and a month or 2 later it came back higher than before.
I hope senserely it will happen to this wondefull site.
 
Amin--

I'm a pretty much retired database administrator (though trained in a different flavor) and it sounds like your change to the search length has broken one or more of their sql queries in the database. A quick check would be to have your host restore the old settings. If that fixes things, then a change in the search string may have to be done by the developers or their dba. Hope this helps. I too, really enjoy this site and the folks that hang out here.

Best of luck--Jim
 
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