Anybody experiencing decline in traffic
 

Hi all,

I've been using vBulletin for a couple of years now.

All was going fine, but since last 4 days, the traffic has gone down by 50 - 60%. I rank very well for my main keywords, but have lost out on a few long tail keywords.

All the long tail keywords are pushed to the second page.

Some of the changes I made to my site, before I started experiencing the decline in traffic are:

1> Implemented 'Facebook fan page' in the header and facebook / twitter / +1 in widgets which was placed to the left of the website.

2> I'm still on 4.1.3 and haven't upgraded to 4.1.4

Is anyone else experiencing similar problem ?

Not upgrading, can it be the reason for me to lose traffic.

What's a mystery is, when I compare my previous weeks traffic to my this weeks traffic for the main keywords, it shows 20 - 25% decline, but when I personally search across various Google center, I rank number 1 for the main keywords.

Do you think it's a possible hack or some thing similar ?

Please advice me.

Thanks.

Resubmitt your sitemap. When you make radical changes let the bots come back and have a look see.
Something else to consider is it's summertime. It's getting back toward school time and families are out on that last summer trip.

Setishock - Can summertime cause 50% traffic loss ? I hadn't seem similar behavior last year. The forum has been up for close to 8 years. So not sure if it's the summer which is creating the problem.

Anything else I should be looking at ?

FWIW, AWStats is showing all our metrics to be holding steady. Note however, that we don't concern ourselves with SEO black magic.

There you probably have it. You asked your members to go to facebook and twitter. From there your competitors could just invite your members. Plus a number of your members are now enjoying themselves on facebook instead of on your site. The idea is to get members from facebook to your site. Not the other way around.

Is there a nasty redirect exploit hidden in your datastore table?