Keep a close eye on any big changes you do to your website
Live by Google…. Die by Google… With Google having 65% or more of the market share and often driving more than that percentage of traffic to websites, you need to make sure that if you do any big changes to your website, that it doesn’t have a detrimental affect on your website traffic, or you’ll loose your positioning on organic results, Adsense revenue etc.
Your website should have detailed stats to allow you to see visitors numbers and cross referencing should allow you quickly pickup on big changes in traffic. Some people say that you shouldn’t check your stats every few hours, and I’d agree or you’ll start to get paranoid - but checking once or twice a day won’t do any harm.
I tried a little experiment on one of my sites which in theory should have boosted traffic, but infact it had the opposite affect. The experiment was to change the Title Tag and Meta Description of the pages to all upper case text. So when my site appeared in the search results, Google would have shown this text in upper case for my site. Users would have seen the uppercase text and their eyes would have been drawn to it.
Within about 3-4 days of implementing the change (across all pages on the site), traffic dropped by about 40-50%. I kept it going for about another 10 days just to ensure that the peak/trough wasn’t down to something like good weather and people being outside enjoying themselves and not using the internet as much.
When I reversed the change so that the Meta Description and Title Tag fields appeared in propercase, within about 10 days traffic went back to the same level as before - phew!
Although I’d lost Adsense revenue during that period from having less visitors, the leads to sales conversion rates actually went up - so I was getting better quality leads - just not as many.
So I think the moral of the story is that if you do big changes to your site that search engines would notice, then check your stats regulary to assess any negative impact on traffic to your site and act accordingly.
