My stats suddenly dropped. What happened?

Avatar
enature
  • Answered
Checking my Google Analytics account I've noticed a sudden sharp drop in visitors which I can only explain that something must have changed in the settings of my hosting (robots, filters or something).

The drop happened about in the third week of February from 600 daily visitors down to now less than 100 daily visitors. I cannot explain this drop by just being "less popular" since my equivalent Android application of the website drives a lot of new users to using the website as well.

Did anything change in my hosting settings? Did you change anything. Blocking any search engine crawlers or changing anything in a robots file for my hosting? My domain is cheat-database.com.

Thanks for your information.

Best Regards,
Dominik Erbsland
Replies 1
Avatar
0
JacobIMH
Hello Dominik, and thank you for your question. Taking a look back at your account notes, I do see mentions of an email that was sent to you from our system administration staff with the subject: Problem with search engine crawlers and query strings. In that email it looks like we detail there was a server load issue with your VPS and it was tracked back to the crawling of query strings in your URLs. Here is the explanation from that email:
If query strings should not be crawled, please add this to the site's robots.txt: User-agent: * Disallow: /*?* You will also need to log in to Google Webmaster Tools and set how Google should handle query strings: URL parameters - Google Webmaster Tools Help Due to the volume of requests, in order to avoid an account suspension we have added this code to the site's .htaccess file to block robots from crawling query strings: ### ADDED to block robots from query strings <IfModule mod_rewrite.c> RewriteEngine On RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^.*(bot|crawl|spider).*$ [NC] RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} ^.*$ RewriteRule ^(.*)?(.*) - [F,L] </IfModule> ### END blocking query strings If you have set Google to crawl some query strings, simply remove this block of text from .htaccess. If you do not wish to have any search engines crawling query strings, you can leave this block in place.
It looks like your robots.txt file had been updated to block query string crawls from search engines, and the .htaccess rules appear to have been commented out. Aside from that, it's also important to keep in mind that the Google Penguin 2.0 update did just happen last week on May 22nd, 2013. There have been tweaks going into the search algorithms used by Google, and in this most recent update I have been reading that gaming sites got hit pretty hard, so that could be the issue at hand as well. Please let us know if you had any further questions at all. - Jacob