Monthly Buzz: August 2008 Roundup

by Keith Dsouza | Translate | Print
Saturday, 30th Aug 2008 | Share


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It’s the end of another great month here at Techie Buzz, several good and bad things happened during the month, and we will discuss them in this post. Unlike the last month roundup, we are including some basic statistics this time around, due to requests from our readers.

Basic Blog Stats for August 2008

No of Posts: 90

In August we wrote 90 posts which is comparatively lower than the 110 posts we wrote in July, there were several reasons for this and we will talk about them in the post, in the problems we faced section.

Traffic Statistics

Traffic increased significantly over July 2008, but there were 14 days of a lean patch which lost us quite a bit of traffic. Overall we were happy with the traffic, but it could have been much higher had we not been in a lean patch for 14 days of this month.

  • Total Unique Visitor: 80000+
  • Page Views: 150000+
  • Search Engine Traffic: 52.51%
  • Referring Sites: 36.94%
  • Direct Traffic: 10.56%

As you can see our main source of traffic, search engines dropped significantly by over 25%, and most of those were in the 14 days lean patch, keep reading to know what went wrong in those 14 days. In September we would see a definite increase and hope to see these figures changing significantly.


Feed Subscribers

We gained over 200 readers this month, but several problems including the recent move to Google account lost us few on the way. We are clearly not happy with the numbers here and will be trying to significantly increase the number of regular readers.

Other Interesting News

We moved the top commentators widget to the sidebar from the bottom, this will give all our commentators a site-wide backlink on the first scroll of the page, so gear up those comments to get into the list.

Problems we Faced in August 2008

There were several problems we faced in this month, which lost us significant subscribers as well as traffic and a huge chunk from the revenue. The first was the hosting setup which conked off for a day, nose-diving our feed subscribers to almost half, though there were several things we needed to tweak, our servers are now running pretty good with 100% uptime for 2 weeks in a row now.

Another big problem we faced was becoming a victim of Google Dance, where for 14 days in a row Google Search dropped the traffic it sent us by over 90%. We are not sure what exactly the problem was, but yes it was a nightmare, going from over 3000+ hits from search engines to less than 400 per day is a webmasters nightmare. We not only lost significant amount of traffic, it also nose-dived our confidence level.

We overcame the situation and after irregular posting for 5 days were back to normalcy, though Google did not restore the normalcy with Search engine results for another ten days. We contacted Google Webmasters several times over the issue, asking them what our mistakes were, but didn’t get any response from there. We learnt a big lesson from this, always follow the guidelines laid down by Google Webmasters, if you are not sure what is wrong, try contacting them, but, don’t expect a response back. The normalcy will be restored, but nothing is in your hands, except for the fact that you need to follow any guidelines laid down by them.

Another thing many people may advice you is that don’t over-rely on Google for your traffic, we would like to contrast that statement, because more than half of the top blogs without Google Traffic will look like newbies.

Goals for September 2008

Well there are several internal goals we have setup for this month and few of those include not getting tangled in with Google again :) , increasing feed subscribers and of course increasing traffic and revenue.

Well most of these goals are every websites dream, we would refrain from discussing numbers as we would like to focus on giving the best content to you, and leave the rest of the worrying to ourselves.

Top Posts in August 2008

There were several interesting posts in this month, we would definitely not want our readers to miss out on anything, so here is a list of the best posts in this month.

We could not include all of the articles we wrote in this month, but you can always view them by visiting our archives, if you are looking to find our all time top posts, you can easily browse them in the top posts section.

Summarizing

Overall it has been a great month for us and we want to thank our readers for the support they have given us. We hope to make it another wonderful month in September with great posts and content you should find interesting. We are already geared up for September and hope to take a day off tomorrow before we continue giving you the best news we can. Signing off for August 2008.

Do share your views with us, we are always open to discussions.



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3 Responses so far | Share Your Opinions!

  1. abhishek
    September 1st, 2008 at 1:30 am #

    Looks like a roller coaster month for techie buzz, keep on posting these great articles u will get ur goals, all the best wishes for Techie Buzz. :)

    Reply to this comment

  2. Rockstar Sid
    September 1st, 2008 at 3:35 am #

    This drop in search engine normally happens wen you have posts which are targeted to lot of words.. I mean keyword stuffing!

    It once happened to my blog where the searches went down from 3k to 1k.. so I just changed the theme.. 1 different theme each day and it worked! back to normal now :)

    This was my experience.. Good to know you have 1.5lakh traffic..Congrats!

    Reply to this comment

  3. Sandip
    September 1st, 2008 at 8:23 pm #

    Hi Keith,

    Even i have seen some change in SERP for many post, many webmaster reporting some changes in Google Search Algorithm which has lead to this changes.

    couldn’t able to find what sort of change they have implemented but its related to some thing devaluing blog links and excessive keyword based anchor links (I am not sure).

    Reply to this comment

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