Hello! I have a quick question. My website was getting over 1000 visitors per day. I recently pushed a major update (using VSD) and since I did so, my website doesn't get more then 40 visitors per day! I am on day 7 since the update and visitor numbers are not improving. Any thoughts on why the sudden drop!? I can understand a small decline...but not one this huge!!!!!

Hi Kathleen,
Did you change any of the page names? .

Can you share a link to your website?

Hi Kathleen

It does seem strange. Maybe your host is behind reporting the hits. Which brings up the point how do you check hits? do you use a script on your page, have you left something off.

Did you have good recognition in Google, has that changed. Do what Scott suggests without a link we have no idea what to advise.

I hadto change my crawlrate but goodness, I'd be stoked with 40 hits day hahaha Some days its 500 somdays its 2

My website has some "messed up" pages which I am currently fixing. When I originally re-did my site (to give it a fresh look for the new year) I used a font which, unfortunately, wasn't recognized by many browsers, therefore, it defaulted to times new roman which screwed up a lot of the spacing, etc and made many pages look bad. Like I said...should have that fixed this weekend.
My goal was to also stream-line my site so I did delete about 100 pages (but none of these pages were frequently visited according to "stat counter" so I didn't think that deleting them would matter that much. All of the pages that are the most popular "entry" pages based on search criteria remain the same (did not change their page names, etc). In any event....here is the site...
www.bunnyroobeagle.com

Also...since you all seem to know what you are talking about and I am clearly a novice with all of this I have one more question. I can't get the facebook follow and like buttons to work properly. I finally took them off all pages except the home page because they were not working. Even now....my site says one number and the actual FB page has a different number (of likes). Don't know why they would differ. Any thoughts on this? Also...when people hit the follow button...they get an error.

Hi Kathleen
Add this to the iframe code for the Facebook follow button.

height:30px;

Place it to the left of the width:450px;

Thanks Eric...will give that a try. Much appreciated.

one thing you should consider doing is setting up redirects for all the pages you deleted. Could be a lot of your traffic may have been coming from those pages (or links to them in search engines even if those pages weren't the ones that were most useful), and now when they see those links, which ARE still on Google and other search engines for quite a long time, they cannot get to them.

If you go to your server cPanel or whatever setup it has, you should be able to setup redirects for the pages you removed and just send them all to either the home page or whatever page may be closest to the content of the pages you deleted. I would just send them to the home page myself for ease of processing so many pages.

Right now all those pages you deleted are 404 errors until they have cycled through the search engines.

The other thing you should do is a site map if you haven't already and submit it to the search engines again so they can spider the new setup to help get past those missing pages. Just some food for thought there

Another option is to add redirects to your .htaccess file for the pages that were removed, named changed or location changed.

Redirect 301 /myoldpagename.html http://mydomain.com/mynewpagename.html