Welcome to the Q&A Forum

OK I see what you mean, Robert - that is a great idea. I'm a programmer too, so a call to me isn't a phone call, it is a call of a program, in this case a direct access - from someone who typed in the url or has the site bookmarked. I'm mixing up my nomenclature, sorry for the confusion.

yes, that was horrible. If they tested it first, it must have been with a bunch of goth geeks

Is it possible that this direct traffic is coming from email? I've seen big direct traffic spikes when a link has "gone viral" over email. The other thing I would check for is multiple Google analytics tags on the home page (double counting your traffic), but you would probably see a crazy low bounce rate if that were the case.

Your link returns a 404. Could you cut and paste?

It depends on the kind of content you are going to have there. As you mentioned, if you expect good quality inks and a lot juice there, I'd suggest doing it on a sub-directory. However, if you are going to be creating many pages that could be considered 'thin' (little/no content pages, no backlinks at all, no images, etc), I'd say go with the sub-domain so as to have a buffer of its possible repercussions on the main website.

Thanks for your replies. I do not know what they were ranking for their main keywords a year ago because I wasnt working on the account back then and dont have any webposition reports from that time. I do have analytics for back then and can see they were getting like 40 click thrus a day for each exact keyword and now there are basically none for those keywords. Interestingly, according to webposition, they are on the second page of google now for these really huge high traffic keywords,  but the same keywords on webmasters tools show low impressions and a position of 380. The top keywords shown on webmasters tools are all much more obscure terms from the blog. Webmaster tools also shows 400 not founds and 70,000 pages restricted by robots text. I addressed these issues with our programmer in early January and he said the robots was as it should be and the not founds were taken care of but doesnt look like anythings changed. Basically the only keywords the site is getting click thrus thru search on are much more obscure things that are mentioned in different blog posts. For example, it would be like my site used to get traffic for "custom motorcycles" (just an example)but now if I have a blog post for brown leather motorcycle seat, we'll get a handful of click thrus for something like that but we have lost all the heavy hitting keywords. No site map on WT but if you google site: it shows 32,000 pages. Thanks again.

Hi Alan Ok, i've added yadav to webmasters tools and have done a permanent 301 from abhishekyadav.com to Replicahause.net and have informed google of such in webmasters tools too. I will wait for a couple of days, or perhaps weeks to see what changes go through and keep you posted. Thanks for the input. Sudesh

@ Brian - I wondered about the same thing.  Today's Moz SERPs report shows changes similar to what you described.  Bing results are very volatile for my site(s) so I can't be "sure".

Yes I totally understand and appreciate your comments. The original website is doing well, but always could be better of course I will continue with that and divide my time onto the new website also. Probably best because you've not got all your eggs in one basket that way as well.

Awesome link Stephen!

Thanks Brent! I figured as much. Those articles are definitely helpful.

Hi André, While Meta Descriptions really don't effect the Search Engine Rankings it can give a quality signal for your page, just as you quoted, by the click-through-rate. If you think about it, it makes sense, if you get a high number of impressions in SERPs but you have a low CTR, what could cause it? Do you have an engaging Title? Do you have an engaging Description? If you were a Search Engine and you see someone in the top 10 results for a highly searched query, but with a low CTR, would you let them stay there? (Underlining the fact that your motto contains: "make the web a better place"). If it was me, who can take that decision... I wouldn't let them stay there. Both your Meta Title and Meta Description should describe the real intent of the specific page, of what you are trying to deliver there. Write your meta title and meta description for your potential visitors and your CTR will grow. I hope that helped, Istvan

For some webmasters, Google has been mysterious for the past year. Duplicate content, thin content, spun content, lots of ads above-the-fold, ugly design and other site characteristics are blamed for reduced rankings. I have a site that contains some republished government content and some very short blog posts.  Some pages on that site saw reduced rankings in October.  We noindexed the duplicate and thin content in November plus cut back on some ads and most rankings recovered in January. Lots of very experienced SEOs are guessing at what factors Google is using. Anybody who tells you what to do based upon the minimal information that you provided is guessing. Anything that you can do to strengthen your content to a unique and substantive position would probably be time well spent - even if it is not your current problem.   You say that you don't have ads, so you can eliminate that as a potential problem.

Great! I see that you made the design wider.  I think that is an improvement. Thanks for the report.