Google Product Forums

Re: Huge drop in traffic

travler May 1, 2012 4:21 PM
Posted in group: Webmaster Central

Categories: Crawling, indexing & ranking :

Your http://www.insuranceclaimhelp.org/useful-claim-links/ do indeed seem useful for visitors but with so many of them, perhaps nofollow them for bots.

(good the comments are nofollow - had to smile at the spam one)

might want to get rid of keywords meta tags - google doesn't use/ etc 

<meta name="keywords" content="Insurance, claims, help, advice, questions, auto, car, home, homeowners, business, denied, policy, form, total, loss, fire, wind, water, flood, hail, arson, law" />

about the cache  this is in your meta tags - I think the noarchive is the culprit


<meta name="robots" content="noodp,noydir,noarchive" />


On Tuesday, May 1, 2012 7:09:28 PM UTC-4, AdjusterRon wrote:
Is there a crawling error by Google bots, or was my site penalized by Google, and if so why?

Website traffic dropped from 900-1400 visitors a day to 200-250 visitors a day on or about March 22, 2012. It had taken several years for my traffic to build up. 

At first I thought ich.org (short for insuranceclaimhelp.org) got mixed in with others for back link blog networks that I heard Google came down on heavy in March. But ich.org had no such involvement with back linking (unless an enemy did it). I also had not received any warnings from Google that ich.org was in violation of any of their guidelines. 

On 4-30-12 I noticed that google search results for ich was not showing cached pages for the last 4 years. Google also is not showing search results for postings since 3-22-12 unless they are enclosed in quotes. My CleverStat Google Monitor does not even show page positions for postings, so they must really be buried deep in Google search result pages.

I just now accessed my Google Webmaster Tools to find 7 notifications of "significant drop in traffic". And I also saw a notice of "crawling problems" (I also had failed to configure Webmaster Tools to notify me by email of problems).

So now I wonder if there was a Google crawling error due to a Wordpress plugin I installed on 3-12-12 Share Buttons by Lockerz ? I just deactivated that plugin today.

I have read the FAQs and checked for similar issues: Yes

My site's URL (web address) is: http://www.insuranceclaimhelp.org

Thank you.