Lost 90% off traffic overnight, possibly due to a wordpress theme upgrade?

Marketing
1

Hello all,

My website traffic was hitting 5000 views per day, and went as high as 6100 on Sunday, and as expected dropped to about 5300 on Tuesday (less traffic during weekdays). Most traffic comes from google.

Then on Wed March 6th, it dropped to 450 visits.

I’ve had a look and don’t believe there has been any Google Panda updates.

The only thing I recall doing is on March 5th I upgraded my wordpress theme. The header tags and titles, etc all remained the same but there were a couple of html tag changes, nothing that changed the layout. I had a look at Google Webmaster Tools and my site was processed on March 6th, but I’m of the mind that it normally takes Google a few days to download the sitemap and process it

Of the few keywords I manually keep a track of, the one to my most popular page dropped from about 7 position to 62. another keyword dropped from 6 to 29. Only one keyword has remained in place at position 2. For other keywords I don’t see having scanned 10 pages. I’m actually finding sites from other countries which have content not relevant to my country at a higher ranking than me.

I would love it if anyone could provide advice on what reason(s) I could have lost most of my website traffic and what I can do.

Thank you.

2

It is very unlikely that a WordPress upgrade would affect your site that much, unless Google Analytics wasn’t picking up any users?

Also, are you sure your site was up all through that day?

3

Hi,
Thanks for the reply. I’ve checked analytics and their is data there for every hour, the site traffic plummeted at midnight march 6th and I’m positive the site was up throughout this time.

4

It was just announced this morning that Google just penalized a major link network known as “SAPE” overnight and there is a ton of buzz from webmasters who got buried by the penalty. You may have been part of that SAPE network without even knowing it. You better check out your backlinks in Google Webmaster Tools and go through them one at a time, making sure none of them are on a website that may have been part of the link scheme. Sometimes, fairly or not, a website is judged by the company it keeps.

Check out this article on Search Engine Journal - Google Penalizes Another Link Network: SAPE Links

5

Thanks for the response SC.

I definitely don’t have anything to do with SAPE and I the back links that I do have dont appear to have anything SAPE related, they look relatively legit.

6

I’ve had a theory looking at the GWT graph below (of Pages Crawled), could it be that on the 5th March, it took a very long time to download the pages that Google did something (it also crawled roughly 80% more pages)