Site Tweaks -- Footer Bad?

September 23, 2005 | 18 Comments

Some very interesting things have happened since my redesign earlier this week. The most notable of which is that my daily traffic was cut by about 70%.

It was a huge drop off. The biggest I’ve ever had.

Since most of that traffic comes from search engines like Google, it’s a bit hard to tell what exactly caused this. My guess is it’s a combination of things, one of which could have to do with how Google has last reindexed my site.

I’ve got a sneaking suspicion that it might have something to do with the fact that I removed the navigation at the top of my pages. That nav led to my archives, among other things. Now, I’m not an expert at how Google indexes pages, but I do know that it usually takes about 3 days to get a new page indexed. It was exactly 3 days after my redesign went live that I noticed the drop.

Could be coincidence, but I doubt it. Again, I’ve had dips in traffic before but this was off the charts and it effected every bit of my site. It was almost like the site was down for most of the day.

In any case, I’m doing a bit of tweaking to see if I can have any effect on it. I’m not sure any of you will notice but I thought it’d be a good idea to clue you in. Most of what I plan to do shouldn’t hinder anyone’s use of the site. If anything it should help.

Filed under: News
Keyword Tags: redesign web+site+traffic web+development SEO google

Comments

1. Michael Carpentier said:

You maybe right.

Google gives greater importance to stuff on top of a page, including links.

And if you changed your site structure, Google will have to reindexes it from scratch.

You should try a Google sitemap.xml. It works well for me.

Good luck!

Posted on September 23, 2005 07:22 AM | #

2. Keith said:

Michael – Yeah, I’ve got the whole sitemap thing going, but it’s been awhile since I’ve updated it. It could be nothing. It already looks like things are trending back to normal. After years of running this Web sites I’ve grown used to crazy ass coincidences. Still, I feel better when I’m trying to make things better.

My thinking is that if you make things better for the visitors to your site, you make it better for Google, etc. So far I’ve reworked to have less ads, put back some form of navigation (it’s replicated in the footer as well) and added a plain jane “index” to my toplevel page (which has been a redirect for years and needed on anyway.)

The redesign was supposed to be cleaner, but maybe it was too clean. ;0)

Posted on September 23, 2005 07:42 AM | #

3. Simon Jessey said:

Just a thought, but there have been one or two problems with DreamHost over the last few days. Nothing major really, but one of those periods of downtime may have happened at the same time Google’s bot happened to drop by.

Posted on September 23, 2005 07:50 AM | #

4. Brandon Martus said:

I love the footer .. can’t wait to see what else is in store for this redesign.

Posted on September 23, 2005 07:52 AM | #

5. Mike P. said:

> And if you changed your site structure, Google will have to reindexes it from scratch.

Fwiw - He didn’t change the url structure, only the markup structure…

We’ve seen some weird things happening on some client sites in the last few days, Keith. One site went from 9000 indexed pages to 25000 with no changes whatsoever to the site (We were away when it happened - so nothing changed to the site).

In addition, GOOG seems to be sending my blog waay more traffic in the last few days - maybe a shift in the index that - combined with what Simon mentioned about Dreamhost - resulted in some pages being temporarily pulled from the serps?

Hmm.. still a lot of pages indexed!!..

Posted on September 23, 2005 08:00 AM | #

6. Kev said:

Michael: I think you’re slightly in error about Google placing greater importance in whats at the top of a page. I’ve never noticed it make any real difference in literal terms.

It may appear that way because the heading tags would be primarily at the top of the markup (one assumes) and these are definitely given greater weight.

Posted on September 23, 2005 08:06 AM | #

7. Keith said:

Simon – I did notice something late last night. But it seemed to be up most of the day. I was getting traffic, just not that much.

Brandon – I think the footer will stay, I just think it needed some supplemental navigation to help some folks, and perhaps the bots, get around.

Mike – Yeah, I don’t know. In checking yesterday it seemed like it wasn’t that pages weren’t showing up, just that people weren’t finding them. I’d have thought it was the site being down, ‘cept since I just made a pretty signficant change, it got me thinking.

Posted on September 23, 2005 08:10 AM | #

8. Tom Passin said:

Keith, your Google ads show up on IE/Win, but not on Firefox 1.06/Win. I’m happy to skip them, but it’s probably not what you want.

Nits - you have an illegal id value (“9rules” - id values can’t start with a number, only letters or underscores), and you still have an unescaped ampersand, in “Geek News & Stuff”.

I really like the clean, spare but elegant look.

Posted on September 23, 2005 09:03 AM | #

9. Trevor said:

I think it might have a little to do with Dreamhost, as well. They’ve been going down a whole lot lately. I also wanted to comment that I really like the new design! It’s very clean, and it’s different to give the post titles the… sort of… center stage.

Posted on September 23, 2005 10:49 AM | #

10. Keith said:

Tom - thanks for the tip. I’d known about the unescaped ampersand for awhile and intend on sorting it. I’m not too worried about the ads right now, but I’ll look into that as well.

Trevor – I haven’t seemed to have any problems with my uptime. I dunno. Thanks for the comments on the site, that was the plan.

Posted on September 23, 2005 11:35 AM | #

11. JAbbott said:

I wonder if your Google indexing would improve if you placed the footer content first in the HTML (with a skip link of course) but positioned it at the page bottom with CSS.

Posted on September 23, 2005 11:45 AM | #

12. Conánn said:

This is a really nice design/re-design, everything about it is sharp. I wasn’t crazy about the last one, but this one is really smooth.

Posted on September 23, 2005 01:21 PM | #

13. Chris Griffin said:

Google can tell when you change your website a significant amount and your rankings usually take a hit temporarily. Though, I agree with everybody else that moving your navigation to the bottom also played a big role in your hit.

Posted on September 23, 2005 06:16 PM | #

14. Steve Hubbard said:

I was tracking the keyword results in google (http://www.digitalpoint.com/tools/keywords/) for one of my sites (www.caskids.org) earlier this week when one term dropped 9,930 spots. It had averaged third in search engine results for more than two months. No changes were made to the site in any way. It is hosted by dreamhost. As a result, no traffic for about four days.

Posted on September 23, 2005 07:28 PM | #

15. Keith said:

Chris – Well then, it should be temporary, as you say. One thing I’ve noticed today is that, in general, Yahoo provides much more relevant hits than Google does. So, if nothing else, I learned something.

Steve – Wow, that’s a big drop. I know my stuff dropped, but I don’t know how much, or why. Hopefully it’s nothing long lasting.

Posted on September 23, 2005 07:52 PM | #

16. Robert Wetzlmayr said:

Keith,

although I like the idea of embracing the footers, adding importance to it and encouraging readers to go all the way down I find myself bored in the middle of scrolling through umpteen comments. This might be the cause why the relocation of important navigational elements to the very bottom reduces traffic at your site.

Maybe a close analysis of your logfiles would show that you haven’t lost visits, but visitors tend to leave earlier because they can’t dig the whole scrolling.

I read your blog because of your own content, some times comments add value. But on most instances, I just skip comments at all. Just like mine here will be treated by other readers ;-)

Posted on September 25, 2005 01:25 PM | #

17. Keith said:

Robert – Interesting theory. But I’ve lost visits. Meaning people aren’t even coming in. I can tell I’ve taken a hit as far as Google SERPS go. I’m not sure why exactly.

What’s distressing is when I search for specific titles I used to own the #1 spot for I now show up sometimes 10 or 15 spots down with the majority of spots above me beloning to sites that are linking to me!

Regadless of anything that shouldn’t be happening. Especially when you consider that my site is updated more regularly than most of these, I’ve got a higher pagerank than most of these and my site is coded closer to what is supposed to be helpful to Google.

Yahoo provides much more accurate results I’m seeing. Not only when search my own site, but in general. I’m not sure what is going on, but if I’ve learned anything it’s that I’m going to be using Yahoo a bit more. I am pretty surprised at how good their results are.

Oh, and by the way, I placed some nav links toward the top of the page, at least the way the user sees it. Hope those help you.

Posted on September 25, 2005 04:35 PM | #

18. Michael Moncur said:

If the drop in traffic was 3 days after the redesign, I suspect it was a coincidence. When Google updates, it generally uses data from a crawl at least a week or two old, usually more like a month or two.

Posted on October 5, 2005 10:35 AM | #