17 replies to this topic

[floralxprt]

scorpioilya81 is right. This isn't the appropriate place to review your site and your stats.

Suffice it to say that search engines change the way they determine relevancy all the time and that can change things. That said, your search engine traffic was not down, but your direct traffic was. You might look at whether your server has had a lot of downtime lately as well.

Jill,
Will do that right now. Thanks for the suggestion!

[chrishirst]

Ok!? So..

I deleted the products (which deletes the product sales pages)

.. You deleted some pages (you don't say how many) then you ask why traffic is down??

Isn't it fairly obvious?

[Michael Martinez]

Michael
Doing more research. On Jan 30, 2011, I had a bunch of products that were old and no longer available. Each had a sales page, 1 page per product, that my system creates. I deleted the products (which deletes the product sales pages), and then I added them all to the robots.txt so that Google wouldn't crawl them and get a Page Not Found error. I used Xenu to make sure that I wasn't linking to any of these products in content, and cleaned that all up. I also created a new sitemap (both .xml and .html) that I loaded up to the root of my system and published so that Google would find my new products that I also uploaded so I could start selling those.

Could Google be punishing me for this? If so, what did I do wrong?

You should have implemented 301-redirects for the pages you deleted. That is why your Direct Traffic and Referring Traffic numbers went down.