Huge drop in Alexa ratings... What did I do?

[tat2nu]

I had originally private messaged mprough but then I noticed that they only respond to forum posts. Sorry about that, I guess I missed the note earlier. Here is my problem.

Can you take a look at my site www. needlejig. com I have been reading your posts for some time and I am pretty sure that you have a real good understanding of what the search engines look at. I have a hard time following along with some of what you are saying but I try because I want to learn as much as I can about what makes my store successful.

My site was consistently ranking about 2.4mil on Alexa.com for years but recently dropped to 6.8mil. I am guessing that something I changed is causing this. There are only two possible explanations that I can think of.

1. I am building a second site in a folder www. needlejig. com/test that is the most current version and a revamp in styling. Could this be why Google WebTools is saying that I have duplicate meta tags and descriptions?

2. For some reason a while back I had activated 'Prevent Spider Sessions' in the Config section of admin. I recently set that back to 'false'.

Both of these events happened right about the time that my ratings started to drop dramatically and my business has slowed over the last month with this week being my slowest week in years. Do you have any idea on what could be causing this or a possible solution to my problem. Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Sincerely,
Marc

[tino.schlegel]

Your website has been hit by the Global Economic Recession. Time to think about new toilet paper :)

[KidPub]

I believe that Alexa ratings are nearly worthless due to the way that they collect data. Quantcast or Compete.com provide much better data.

I wrote an article earlier this year comparing the three services, you can read it here.

Perry

[cwusa]

2. For some reason a while back I had activated 'Prevent Spider Sessions' in the Config section of admin. I recently set that back to 'false'.

90% of search engins use crawlers / bots/spiders all of them use spider sessions by disabling them you were basically blocking the googel bot the yahoo bot the live bot all from indexing you site. this would be why your organic traffic dropped and therefore your alexia ranking. as the alexia only counts traffic not page rank or seo .

theres no quick fix for this but a couple of things you can do i use the googel analytics and webmaster tools ( espically googgle web master tools) and after the basic varification and tracking code insert look under the web master tools for set craw rate.. if you havent done it before you willbe able to set your craw rate to high for a period of 90 days this should help re index your site and make google aware you can be crawled.

another thing you can do i publish a 5 depth level site map.. you can even use a free genrator for this to crawl your own site and make a xml and txt file site map then publish this to google this will also expidite the re listing and then re increase of your organic links


hope it helps and sorry for the spelling its really late and im sleepy

[tat2nu]

I was blocking the spider sessions for a very long time with the decent Alexa rating. The problems seemed to have started when I started allowing them again.

Marc

[tat2nu]

Any other input or recommendations. I am really stumped here and need some help.

Marc

[barco57]

That would be because the spiders are now getting session ids and causing you to have duplicate content because the url with the zenid and without go to the same place. You do not want the spiders to have session ids. I checked google and they are starting to include urls with the session id.....very bad juju


When I check the google page rank I see a 3 and when I check alexa I find 2,838,469