As website owner I am always checking my analytics to see how the site is doing. The gallery doesn’t generate revenue and was never meant to but I like work on the SEO anyway, because it’s fun.
Last week was very bad, traffic wise. I lost about half of the visitors I normally get. Luckily I already knew what was wrong. Two weeks ago I implemented the “Random selection in same category” at the bottom of each single site page. Because this website is an experiment anyway I like to develop new ideas straight on the production site.
Of course it’s the worst you can do to a live site. I eventually got everything working, the sites were pulled properly from the right category, thumbnails ok. Then I realised the links were pointing to the wrong pages. All the “.html” extensions at the end were missing. 404 all over the place . It took me 10 seconds to fix this but it was already to late…
What I didn’t knew at the time was that the Google crawler was on the site while I was working on it. And all the links were indexed, and all the links were returning a 404. The following day, Google webmaster tools was showing 202 page not found. Gutted.
Here is how the traffic from google reacted few days later:
You can clearly see the fall between the 21st and the 22nd of November. And because the crawler doesn’t comes around every day, the week wasn’t that good.
The lesson from that? Don’t develop live if you care. But I don’t :p
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