Strange Website Activity

[iheartkelby]

Hello, I have been building websites for about 4 months now and finally had my first real success with a website.

I found a niche that I was able to get on the first page with. This site was fine and then boom it dropped to #17 around the time of the recent Google changes. So I just thought it was that, I decided to add it as a campaign on here.

This is when I noticed that the pages were not being crawled. So being new at all of this, I researched that.  Of course, the main things were is the privacy and robots.txt.  It is running on wordpress and I know not to set the blog to private, but I wasn't familiar with how to edit the robots.txt.

I found a good plugin that easily allowed me to set the text to allow all bots. It seemed to be set to the normal wordpress settings before, and I never had a problem with any of my websites not being crawled.

Anyway, once I just set it to allow all bots on ALL of my website, the pages started being crawled again.

My traffic went back up and I was on the first page all day yesterday.

Today, so far big drop off. So, I deleted the campaign and set up a new one. Sure enough no pages crawled yet.

I made some security changes using Bulletproof Security and another plugin to see if that effects it.  Nothing yet.

I am just really confused as to what is going on, so if any of you have any ideas that would be great.

It is a simple site, and I made some changes like theme when I was trying to figure out why the pages weren't being crawled. So it is not the most beautiful design right now. Also, I try my best to put up well-written useful content, so I don't think that is the issue for the rankings drops.

I don't have many if any actual backlinks yet because of the newness of my site, could be the reason for it acting strange BUT none of that explains the pages not being crawled at the same time my site drops?????

Sorry so long but had to explain it all! Thanks in advance to anyone who has anything to say about this situation!

Edit: I should clarify, I put the the security plugins on yesterday while I was on the first page and have deleted them to see if that allows the pages to be crawled. Sorry if I wasn't clear.

[Ben-HPB]

It sounds like you are doing everything you can at this moment to get back to the rankings you once saw.

? Have you set up Google Webmaster Tools Yet?

As for your question about a campaign are you bidding on keywords? And is this where you are seeing the flux? If so I would check your landing page quality score to see what Google Rates that landing page and as well find a way to increase and improve the page for better conversion opportunities.

I also noticed you are not using the FREE Google Analytics tool so you can track this type of information that will give you a better idea of what your visitors are doing and where they came from.

Last you mentioned that this is a new website, and with that you will see traffic flux until a few months goes buy for a permanent position however when I say permanent it is dependent on your freshness of content and quality of all.. You will need links and in time those will come, however first focus on User Experience and then you can really start going after the SEO type factors.

I hope this helps a bit.

[iheartkelby]

Thanks for your response! As for campaign I just mean the campaign tool here on seo moz. It is what keeps saying the pages aren't being crawled at the same time my traffic drops. Then when I see the traffic it also says the pages are being crawled on the campaign settings.

Sorry if all of this is wording confusingly, I am struggling to explain exactly what is going on here.

It could all just be coincidental. I probably will have to just wait and see, like you say, traffic is going to be up and down.

I haven't used any Google tools on this website, just because I have been paranoid of the big G lately and read about keeping some data private from them by not using those tools.

Paranoia maybe, so I might consider using those tools just to see if anything strange pops up.

[Andy.Drinkwater]

Pretty much everything William said.

If you do notice your rankings fluctuating, this is just the Google Dance - every new site sees it and you will appear higher to start with and drop when Google figures where you should be placed.

I would suggest using the webmaster tools, get a sitemap in there and get it submitted. I know there are always going to be horror stories and coincidences and people will start worrying, but if you do everything right, you really have no need to

Andy

[iheartkelby]

Thank you both! These are great answers and probably true in this case but I guess that would lead me to a secondary question.

I have seen questions in here about pages not being crawled with the SEOMOZ Campaign tool. So I hate to now post the question, "why are my pages not being crawled?"

But that is the mystery. As soon as I made the new allow all robots text file and submitted it, I checked and instantly my pages were being crawled again. Now nothing again, it just sits at N/A. As well as the traffic dropped off...

Confusing. But I am just going to give it awhile to look for overall patterns or maybe it is a glitch with the SEOMOZ tool that just happens to be corresponding with the traffic dips. LOL, I know strange things like this do occur in this business.

Thanks and if anyone has anymore ideas I am happy to hear them.  I was worried I had some sort of malware or whatever the hackers do to your site????!!!!