Do not touch the jodio code!

Since always gave me panic touching certain things of the portals when operating in a stable.

In the past 45 days we have had a "fun" moment of tension when playing the scheduling of a portal of online games that we had since 2004. This site receives about 25.000-30.000 unique visits a day since 2006 in a stable. Ie figure ever lower those numbers and prints 6,000,000 page views per month.

The stability of the site and traffic can be seen in this graph Analitycs of the first 10 months of the year

In the graph you can see the stability of the site, which is cyclically repeated teeth saw the weekend, except the summer months that the concept weekend away in the webs of leisure.

If the story today because I believe it is especially graphic to be able to see two things, because often the older operating services, better not experiment too much with them, and because Google sends dramatically.

Well, do as 1 month and a half in one of those "bright ideas" that I sometimes get, I decide to update the site a bit to a more 2.0, and with Jorge, our programmer, Jaume, our Chief Technical and Diego, Coordinator of Leisure, I coñazo on a couple of days to make some changes.

In 10 days we have refined the code and changed the concept, without changing the urls indexed or structure of the site we have built into an old CMS in a blog that was launched based on WordPress news that are not published in WordPress, but painted in the Old CMS on the main page, giving a greater sense of updating the website.

It is nice, I feel flex and we are left with a feeling of having to wash his face web, SEO have made some changes to help us climb a little irlo ranking, and details of old have improved usability, so quiet ...

It appears that Google was not taken just as well change, and 1 week sent us into the abyss so inexplicable for me and my team. Literally eliminated 90% of the site's index and left only the new URLs. As much as we review the site we did not find the reason and swear in these 45 days have devoted many hours to think we had done wrong without finding it. The result? A fall of 90% of URLs indexed in Google, and a drop of 90% of site traffic. The same figure until a few days earlier DA FEAR:

The collapse in numbers: 25.000-30.000 of unique users a day until 3.500-3.800 per day. A domain is going to print 6,000,000 page views per month to about 450,000 per month for overnight. The worst thing is to continue without knowing exactly because of expensive and silly that you have left.

That means things besides 2, the first Yahoo! Or Live did not exist. The second that we have not loyal to brand or 10% of users.

After much give laps, our programmer concludes that might be generated a conflict between WordPress and the old CMS that, while not visible to the user and to test our spiders, and not find out anything well, or have any problems of usability, it could be affecting the search engine, which decided to remove urls 6000 index of well-indexed and with good positions in less than 7 days, leaving some token 230.

Conclusion, last Monday Jorge performs some modifications, particularly in the htacess and the relationship of our CMS with WordPress, Jaume and I do not have the slightest confidence that we resolve the issue in that way because we still had not seen the problem ... but voilá ... Google is starting to eat again urls (goes by 1,800 indexed and even much) and the traffic starts to rebound slowly. I hope that we leave in a month where we were ... We have already started climbing up towards the back.

And is that many times on things that work, "were seen but not touched" is totally fustifica, and we must be careful with the things that are foolish for not taking risks.

Tags: analitycs, Google, games, SEO, usability