Traffic problems

I am having a serious traffic problem. My website capped at 40 uniques a day and it’s being going downhill since then to about 18 and it may even go on further down. I submitted the sitemap to Google through webmaster tools last Friday, and it says “4,191 Submitted / 2,603 Indexed”.
Why aren’t they all indexed? How can I find out which ones aren’t?


I’ve been reading about the big broohaha over the Google updates, could this be what capped my traffic?
I have about 12-20 updates a day, I have SE friendly URLs, perhaps I should be using black hat, I’m feeling a little discouraged.

[FONT=verdana]I’m confused about your use of the term “capped”. That suggests that there is some block on the number of visitors you are getting. Is that what you are saying? Or do you mean that the actual number of visitors has fallen from 40 to 18 per day?

If the latter, you first need to determine where the missing numbers were coming from. You mentioned Google a couple of times in your post, but are you sure that the missing people were visitors who were previously sent by Google? You can check that from your AW Stats. And, if they did come from Google, can you be sure that the numbers are down because you have dropped in the search results? As you are using Google Webmaster Tools, you can easily check that by looking at the changes in your rankings over the period in question.

A final point: A drop from 40 to 18 per day might seem catastrophic in percentage terms, but the numbers are not really big enough to be considered a representative sample. It could be caused by some minor glitch, such as a new competitor coming on stream.

To summarise: Don’t start worrying about Google updates or SEO techniques until you have determined what exactly is causing the drop in traffic.

Mike[/FONT]

Well, the visits I get are organic (my website is a software library like Softpedia, and at the moment it features about 3,000 apps added by me manually), so I can tell that I am getting traffic by the download count. I mean, unless Google has multiple IPs and those are the only visits I get. But I started at 11,000,000 something in Alexa (586 uniques according to Awstats in January and since then climbed to about 2,100,000 something, where I peaked in May (1140 uniques). Now I know Alexa isn’t 100% reliable but it does help gauge popularity to a degree. What I don’t know is what caused my website to peak at 1140, because I haven’t changed anything of what I was doing. If anything i made it far more attractive and functional (added categories,- yes I know -, made it easier to submit software - changed the bland design, etc) and kept adding software listings. I don’t do any black hat SEO (I don’t know how :j), no traffic exchanges (maybe I should…) I do 10-20 updates daily, and it is not banned. But something just doesn’t click, or else it would be growing, not going downwards. And since a lot of people are complaining that their traffic has dropped abruptly after the Google updates, I was wondering if that is what hit me. I know the traffic is weak (even 40 a day is ridiculous), but that is precisely the problem: I must be doing something wrong.

Really hard to know without seeing the site, but most of all

Content is king

You can’t watch this on a daily basis, keep adding content, make sure it’s unique and relevant, and assuming the page isn’t absolutely broke somewhere, it’ll eventually pick up traffic. Be patient.

Recently Google has updated their penguin algorithm so maybe by that you got suffer. But make sure always to post quality content because search engine prefer first for quality and unique content.

Well, i guess its not because of any algorithm, its just that your competitors are performing better than what you are! You are not promoting your site and there is no backlink base of yours i’m right? So how do you expect to improve on the ranking by merely updating the content?

So how do you expect to improve on the ranking by merely updating the content?
Well, it used to work fine until May. Second of all, most of the backlinks (notice I said most) aren’t worth squat. I mean, yes, you get backlinks from obscure directories nobody visits or if they do come across them accidentally they will just close the window right away. It’s not like I’m on the frontpage of Digg or they wrote about me on Wired (now those would be good links). What else do you suggest I do for promotion? I have set up a Facebook and Twitter page, but I have the same problem: no followers and I don’t see how to get started. But I think the problem stems from the fact that my website isn’t indexed properly. In Google Webmaster tools, the thumbnail for the website is wrong. It also says it hasn’t indexed half the links in my sitemap, and yet it says it hasn’t encountered any problems with non-indexable URLs. Go figure. Also the cache for my website is from July 3rd, and that hasn’t changed for quite some time, even though I’ve been submitting the sitemap religiously and it says it processed it, while everybody and their mothers’ cache is from August 23rd. (padlibrary.com http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:Zbm4364T2_kJ:www.padlibrary.com/+&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk, softpedia.com http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:CFd55qYe2lwJ:www.softpedia.com/+&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk, even the dailymail.co.uk http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:dStL6GC-ldsJ:www.dailymail.co.uk/+&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk

Google says differently:
http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=35769#1

Quality guidelines - specific guidelines
Provide unique and relevant content that gives users a reason to visit your site first.
Create a useful, information-rich site, and write pages that clearly and accurately describe your content.

Of course, they could be full of *it. I’ve read somewhere that they are deliberately driving traffic down to websites lately, to force more website owners to pay for sponsored listings. And in spite of acting all huff-and-puff about SE spamming, look at what this website is doing
http://www.whosdatedwho.com/tpx_6214319/laura-codrua-kovesi/categories harvesting content from wikipedia. And they’re in the first spot when searching for that woman’s name.

it does not mean that you had submitted sitemap through google webmaster tool and all will be indexed within a day or a week. Even when you read about google webmaster help, it mentioned that it will be help to submit xml sitemap but not giving guarantee that all urls will be indexed. you have to do quality backlink for your website. and update unique content on your blog daily.

That would be Penguin then most likely.