Moved Site to New Server, Traffic Down By 30%

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Moved Site to New Server, Traffic Down By 30%

Billy Batson

11:22 pm on Sep 21, 2006 (gmt 0)

Hi,

I recently moved my content based website (20,000 pages of reviews) to a new server (faster, more room to grow), but over the last week, my traffic has noticably trailed off.

I left the site up for a number of days on the old server to help the transition while folks' ISPs updated their DNS records. I have now removed the site, but left the DNS records on the old server pointing to the new IP. I have also created a dummy account on the old IP, that has an .htaccess file that redirects users to the domain.

Stupidly, I also left the Google Sitemap python program going on both servers. Do you think I could have been pinged for spamming Google?

Thanks,
BB

Billy Batson

6:16 am on Sep 23, 2006 (gmt 0)

Any ideas?

physics

5:32 pm on Sep 23, 2006 (gmt 0)

Did you notice traffic from a specific source drop more than for others (i.e. google more than yahoo?).

tedster

8:38 pm on Sep 23, 2006 (gmt 0)

What statistic, exactly, are you looking at when you talk about traffic -- is it unique IPs, search engine traffic, page views, or some other metric? It makes a big difference in coming up with ideas of things to check.

For instance, if your page views are down and your site's navigation depends on server-side scripting in some places, then something may be configured differently on the new server causing your cgi related links to break.

Also, does the new server use a different analysis package, or log things differently in any way? You may not be measuring the exact same things, if that's the case.