I’ve been running websites since 1995 and have seen visitor traffic ebb and flow, rise and fall, come and go. My main sites (this technology site and Sciencebase.com, its science-based sibling) have seen steady growth since launch, but every now and then there are lulls in interest. These never seem to coincide with anything in particular, certainly not the much-discussed Google algorithm updates of which the Farmer and Panda updates were the most recent (supposedly cleaning up their SERPs by getting rid of zero-value spam sites known as content farms, a point on which they seem not to have been wholly successful).

Anyway, traffic slid over on Sciencebase during the Easter/Passover period, a few days after many Brits were reporting that their .co.uk sites were suffering from the UK version of Panda. Sciencebase.com is US hosted and has a .com domain, so I assumed the two things were not related. Nevertheless, there has been lots of discussion about how to recover from Panda (which has seen some big worthy sites lose 30-40% if not more of their usual traffic for no apparent reason). The discussions usually center on ensuring that one’s site complies with Google’s terms and conditions for webmasters.

I figured it had been a while since I checked out Google Webmaster Tools and the various error-reporting logs it produces for a site, so I logged in and scanned the various categories and attempting to fix broken links, missing title tags, removing duplicate meta descriptions and ensuring that external links (from worthy sites) were pointing to valid pages (often other webmasters break the links with their html or split a long link inadvertently, it’s a simple matter to 301 redirect to the correct page using .htaccess and so rescue any link juice that might have leaked.

In the meantime, of course, traffic to Sciencebase had been rising again after the holiday, so I needn’t have been cocerned. Nevertheless, I’ve hopefully eradicated all the errors and problems that Google WMTs flags in time for their next update. Onward and upward folks!