Since last month, I noticed a sharp decline of my unique blog visitors and I thought that it was because of the weekend, and then I thought that it was because of the Memorial weekend holiday. After that, things still did not pick up and my traffic continued to decline. I thought that perhaps, my blog was being penalized and that it has been de-indexed from the major search engine.
I went searching for my posts in the search engine, especially long tail keywords that I am sure were ranked high and they were missing. I was, of course, dismayed because my traffic fell drastically. I thought it was because I have changed servers and that I did not redirect the spiders to crawl my blog in the new IP, but then it should not be the case since I am using the same domain and retained all my permalinks.
Then I went through Webmaster Central to check and realised that my Cache was gone, my post titles were all broken and of course, my SERP was wiped out.
I spent two days thinking that the problem occurred because I have changed the values between my title tags although the new one was supposed to be search engine optimized. I had to download a fresh copy of my WordPress template from the author’s site and copy the default value over.
Then I found that there was a problem with my robots.txt too. I had to upload a new copy to my root directory. I also resubmitted my Sitemap. I thought I would give the spiders a week to crawl my posts but then luckily I had the presence of mind to write to my web host showing him my problem and he found that it was caused by a plug-in that is incompatible with WordPress 2.5.1
In retrospect, I realise that this plug-in, which was emailed to me by a friend, and came highly recommended by her, never worked for me since the day I installed it, but I thought that I would give it some time to do what it was supposed to do.
As soon as I know that it was the cause, I removed it from my plug-in folder. I don’t even want to bother with adding manual codes to the plug-in file to make it compatible with WordPress version 2.5.1.
Now, I learnt that I will have to wait for at least two weeks for search engine spiders to come and crawl my whole blog again and a longer time for my SERP to be restored. Meanwhile, what I can do is to continue writing and writing and hope that all the activity will attract the spiders to come sooner.
What pisses me off is that my Cache is all gone, my post titles are all broken, my traffic fell so much that my RealRank is koyak as if working with a PR0 blog is not enough, and that I had to spend two days, wasted two days, looking for the problem and still not find it. It was my host who found it. I’m keeping my fingers crossed that my SERP will be restored sooner than expected.