2 replies to this topic

[bims]

First of all, I do apologise as I know this sort of question has been asked many times before. I have searched, and seen some of the articles but as human nature would have it, everyone thinks their case is different.

My website (thanks to you guys here) has been doing very well with search engine positioning (specifically google), and yes it fluctuated every now and then but it would hardly drop off the first page for my ideal search term.

Sometime in June, I decided to proceed with an upgrade (Joomla 1.7 to 2.5) and also use the opportunity to redesign the site. I was very clear about URLs changing and I was assured they wouldn't. In fairness to the developers, very few URLs in the main site changed. However, the new site went live on July 9 and almost immediately the traffic started dropping. See attached. At first I thought it was temporary, but then got a little worried. A couple of weeks ago, I decided to implement another template and it seems traffic is gradually creeping up.

I know the advice (especially if links have not changed) is to look into the code, but I wouldn't know where to start. I checked google webmaster tools and I noticed this error notification:

Increase in authorization permission errors

This may well be part of the problem but I wouldn't know how to go about solving it.

Sorry for the essay but are there any pointers?

Thanks in advance.

Attached Thumbnails

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[chrishirst]

Some (or all) existing/former URLs are now returning a 403 response to crawlers.

Why? Absolutely no idea, but my considered guess would be enforced cookies.

Nice picture by the way, what is it supposed to tell us?

[bims]

Thanks Chris. Always helpful.

The pictures One shows the dip in traffic since site launch and the other shows the jump in the errors from around the same time.