Something strange happened on Monday to my photoblog, In Photos.org. It disappeared off Google’s radar and traffic has dropped like a stone since.
Here’s what traffic and search engine visitors looked like last week.
Clik here to view.
Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.
Here’s where things took a nose dive.
Clik here to view.
And finally, here’s what traffic and search engine referrals looked like yesterday.
Clik here to view.
Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.
I don’t know if it’s connected but on Monday I noticed that my Google sitemap contained an error. This url wasn’t encoded properly and threw the error. It was easily fixed but traffic hasn’t increased yet.
If you use the Google sitemap wp plugin and Ultimate Tag Warrior you may also be using a plugin that adds your site’s tags onto the sitemap. I installed it last weekend here and on my photoblog and didn’t notice this known issue, “Your tag name must not contain an ampersand ‘&’ – if it does, please rename tag without an ampersand – Reported by Jilly”. It’s easily fixed with a urlencode() but I disabled the plugin until traffic gets back to normal.
Would a broken sitemap cause traffic to drop so alarmingly or is it something else?
PS. See you at BarCamp South East? I have a few notes ready. Should be an interesting talk!
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Spurned by Google, ignored by all originally appeared on Holy Shmoly!.
