Traffic drop off and page isn't indexed
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In the last couple weeks my impressiona and clicks have dropped off to about half what it used to be. I am wondering if Google is punishing me for something...
I also added two new pages to my site in the first week of June and they still aren't indexed. In the past it seemed like new pages would be indexed in a couple days.
Is there any way to tell if Google is unhappy with my site? WMT shows 3 server errors, 3 Access denied, and 122 not found errors. Could those not found pages be killing me?
Thanks for any advise,
Greg
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Hi David,
I did add ton of new web pages and because of those got those 404's. I've since cleaned them all up. i thought I had them cleaned up before the my traffic fell but there could be a lag there. I am a little bummber my PR is 2... pretty marginal improvement over 0.
I will keep an eye on my traffic and hopefully it was the bad links.
Thank you for the thoughful response!
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I'm showing your homepage as PR 2. So you're definitely indexed. I also Googled a sentence from you homepage, and it was the first result. So you're good with the index.
Your problem is all of the errors. The bots won't crawl your site as frequently if you have a lot of 404 errors. Also, your server errors and access denied errors are worrisome. Check your robots.txt and make sure it isn't blocking out part of your site. Additionally, you need to track down the server errors and fix them. If you're using a commercial host like Host Gator or Go Daddy, then their customer service can help you with the server side stuff.
Go back to the last time your changed your site's architecture or linking syntax, and that's probably the source of all the 404 errors. Then it's just a matter of figuring out which pages in your site contain links to the pages that are gone and fixing those bad links. You can also petition Google to stop indexing certain pages through the webmaster tools. That helps with the 404 errors.
After the site gets cleaned up, the crawl rate should pick up again. If you want to goose the crawl rate a little bit, but a blog on your site. It's fairly easy to get a wordpress blog looped onto your site. Consistently fresh content always helps a sluggish crawl rate.
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