So after observing a nosedive in traffic for one of my newer websites I was understandably concerned. I had grown rather accustomed to the small trickle of traffic I was pulling in from the search engines on longtail terms. Initially I chalked up the sudden fall in traffic to the Google Sandbox, although this conclusion didn’t exactly sit well with me, as the Sandbox generally shouldn’t come into play with SERPS on longtail traffic.
I did take into account, however, the fact that my traffic started falling shortly after I changed the layout on my website. It turns out that this might have been, from the perspective of pure profits, a bad move. Not that changing the layout itself was a poor decision, I think everyone involved would find the new layout more usable than the old one, it was a combination of changing the layout without changing the sitemap that Google was accessing. After checking in with Google’s webmaster tools, I think I found the problem: Google was trying to crawl my page based on the old sitemap and as a result was finding hundreds of imaginary dead links. It generated over 1,000 crawl errors before I was able to submit a more up-to-date sitemap.
I think these crawl errors are the culprit for why my site suddenly is performing so poorly; Google must think that my site is one big puddle of linkrot! I can only hope that the damage to my site’s SERPs isn’t irreversible and that it will return to its former position in a few days. This assumes that the hit to my site’s traffic is, in fact, due to the sitemap crawl errors and that the two weren’t just coincidentally occurring at the same time.