I recently shared with you my website redesign. Everything was going smoothly and then things started to decline.
The decline coincided with the news of the Corona Virus, so I thought that was the cause. I didn't think much about it when I was down 15% (in pageviews). But then 2 days later, down 37%, then 48% then 56%.
I figured people are focusing on more important issues (like staying safe, buying food, figuring out how to manage with schools being closed, etc.).
And, I'm sure most people were focusing on these activities (as they should).
But I just assumed that to be the cause and didn't look any further....until I went to search for one of blog post because I couldn't remember all 9 of the paint shades I used.
And lo and behold the post that usually delivers close to 60,000 pageviews disappeared. Earlier in the week, it was #1. On Saturday it wasn't on Page 1 at all!
And, it wasn't just that post. They all seemed to be gone.
Check out this picture of my Google Analytics
Yes, my daily pageviews went down from maybe 17,000-18,000 per day to 7,700. Scary right?
If you look at the middle blue area, that's my search volume traffic. It's usually my best source of traffic.
WTH?
So it turns out that something rare happened to me. Due to the new theme, Google (and Bing) stopped crawling my site.
They didn't deindex me...they just didn't know it was there any more.
My tech guy figured out the problem in about 15 mins. So I resubmitted the site map on Saturday around 5pm and started to submit my top articles to Google (via Google Search Console).
By 7pm, my #1 article was back in it's #1 position. Phew! But there are still many URLs it needs to reindex (and I'm limited on the number per day). On Sunday, I started to do the same on Bing.
On Saturday I ended up w/ 11,500 pageviews for the day I was happy w/ that esp given that I didn't have them indexed for most of the day. Yesterday on Sunday, I reached 16,700 pageviews so getting better.
Normally on a Sunday, I get 22,000-24,000 pv (and now naturally things are lower due to all the distraction on the world.
I've gone over my quota for the day, so I'm going to link to a few articles that can still use some help.
- How to clean tile grout the right way
- Best places to buy hardwood flooring online
- How to avoid polyurethane that will turn yellow on your floors
I am not sure that this will help, but I'm hoping that Google will pay attention to these sooner. Oh and this one where to find tile that looks like hardwood.
Wish me luck.
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