I could be wrong, but from your post, it sounds like you may not have much of a handle on the sources of your visitors. It also sounds like you need to understand your ranking performance across a broad cross section of various keywords important to your site (not the top five kw's; the top 200 or more representative kw's across your site...or more).

In most cases following a traffic shift like this, a quick check of referrers and kw ranking report can help identify the issue. Usually it's one search engine, and the kw report can then help identify the nature of the issue.

If that doesn't help, then you can start to dig deeper.

I'll take a flyer too. Wild guess: You have too many links to your homepage as percent of your total inbound links. ;-)

I could be wrong, but from your post, it sounds like you may not have much of a handle on the sources of your visitors.

I'm not really sure what you mean by that. I have AWStats installed and I analyze my log files as much as time allows. I generally keep an eye on the top few hundred keywords, but there is a limit as to how long I can spend on this. I generally spend most of my time adding content to the web site.

But I'm sure I'm missing lots of things. Any tips welcome.

You have too many links to your homepage as percent of your total inbound links

Sorry, but I'm also not clear what that means. Could you please elaborate? Or do you simply mean that of the incoming links from other sites, a very large percent of them go to the home page, rather than other pages in the web site? If so, the answer is probably yes. Isn't that usually the case? There are a number of links to depper pages in my site, especially to forum topics, but obviously most go to the home page.

It's strange, looking at January's keyword stats and this months stats shows that the top 50 or so keywords are still in more or less the same positions. It's just that there are far less visitors coming in.

And Google is definitely the source of the shortfall. It is simply sending less visitors to my site, despite the fact that most of these keyphrases seem to be coming in on the front page of the SERPS.

I'm confused.

Thanks

Ah OK. I seem to have found a whole batch of keyphrases (revolving around my site's forum) that have gone from bringing around 100 visitors a month, to around 15 per month. Other phrases have also dropped slightly, but not as much as the forum related terms.

Upon further research it seems that these keyphrases have simply gone from around 5th on page one of Google's SERPs, to number two on the second page. Which is clearly enough to have a pretty major effect on visitors.

This is quite annoying as I have made a bit of effort recently to promote the forum part of my site with some 'latest threads' type links on my home page. Could this have had such a negative effect? And should I remove these links, or should I tough it out in the hope that they will eventually get 'accepted' by Google?

Hmmmm.

You are not alone Bunnny, check out this thread, no one knows but it seems it might be best to wait it out. http://www.webmasterworld.com/google/3269317.htm [webmasterworld.com]

Thanks Walrus. Not sure this is the same as that, but who knows...? In four years, I've never been affected by these algo changes in the past. This is a new one for me.

Oh well, I don't make the site for Google, I make it for my visitors. But if they can't find me...

And one more strange thing I just noticed. The site has just gone up from PR 5 to PR 6...

Just goes to show. ;)

Unless you're already linking excessively to your 'latest threads' from around your site, I wouldn't remove the homepage links to those. Give it a little time and during that time, make sure you've got a handle on where the traffic loss stems from. Sounds like you more or less know that now.

Sites are measured in all sorts of ways. For example, sites have link profiles. A site with links mainly to the homepage might suggest a site that is lacking good internal content. Sites with links mainly to the homepage are very vulnerable to small shifts in the SE algo's. ;-)

So, work on developing your content more, promoting it, and most importantly, getting links to that great internal content.

Thanks Caveman, that's helpful and somewhat reasssuring.

If I could just trouble you for clarification on this.

Unless you're already linking excessively to your 'latest threads' from around your site, I wouldn't remove the homepage links to those

What I added a few months ago was a 'highlights from this month's topics' section (a new internal page each month). A bit like the home page of WW I suppose, but on a monthly basis. This seemed all good for a few months, until this recent drop. I thought that perhaps a monthly page of links (with short descriptions) to the forum might be seen as artificial somehow.

The featured topics on the home page is the only vey recent change to the site and it got me worried.

Also, when I write an new article, I link to about 5-10 relevent topics from the forums. I've done this for ages.

Is this over the top/excessive? I basically copied the format from other news sites that I find useful.

Thanks again.

Conceptually it sounds fine. What I meant by over doing it was that some sites already have a ton of pages linking to a ton of other pages, with not much hierarchical order, etc. A nice natural pattern of links that includes links helping users find great material right from the homepage should not be a problem, just like it's not a problem for WebmasterWorld.

Sounds more like, unless your site has other issues not outlined here, your site needs more links and some promotional effort.

You might also do a check around your site and make sure you don't have lots of pages that are like lots of other pages. That sort of thing can cause duplicate content issues; but I don't think from what you've described that that is your issue.

It's a good idea too, to track through other threads like that one linked above, just to scan and see if some of the things people are describing remind you of your own site. Often, those threads make people re-think their sites in areas that need re-thinking.

Thanks Caveman. Much appreciated.