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[Richard230]

http://news.motorbiker.org/blogs.nsf/dx/dear-reader.-i-need-your-help-desperately.htm. 

Who shall we blame?  Google, NSA, Russian or Chinese hackers, Obama, or the Republicans?   

Have you checked with the French government yet?   

Good luck solving your problem, Mike.   Sorry I can't help you.  I am internet challenged.   

But I do read almost every one of your articles.   

[Mike Werner]

Thanks Richard. It's got me stumped...; even Google is stumped. I can believe people got tired reading my stuff, but not a couple of million all on the 3rd of November.

[protomech]

Page does not load for me presently.

Edit: nevermind, fixed the link: http://news.motorbiker.org/blogs.nsf/dx/dear-reader.-i-need-your-help-desperately.htm

Do you know where your traffic was coming from? If so, where did you see the traffic suddenly stop coming from?

Google retuned their ranking algorithms recently, it's possible that this could have affected your site:
https://www.seroundtable.com/google-penguin-3-impact-roll-19321.html

[Mike Werner]

Yes, I know the geographical locations, I get a ginormous amount from the far east (Pakistan and Indonesia), and recently I had an article about Israel, so I thought they close access to me there, but it's not the case. Traffic comes through, but like everywhere else it's low.

The ranking algos from Google would AND does effect my revenue, shouldn't eat my traffic.  Revenue is down by the same percentages. Currently my PR is still low, 4, but that was Google who moved it down when I started putting my own ads. A sort of punishment. But again, it shouldn't eat my traffic.

[NoiseBoy]

I can't see the page? Can somebody post the article? I know quite a few Internet geeks.

[Richard230]

NoiseBoy, the link that Protomech posted works for me.  I don't know what happened with the link that I posted.  Maybe I didn't do a good job of cutting and pasting.   

[Mike Werner]

NoiseBoy, the link that Protomech posted works for me.  I don't know what happened with the link that I posted.  Maybe I didn't do a good job of cutting and pasting.   

there's a full stop at the end of the link that needs to be removed....

here it is http://news.motorbiker.org/blogs.nsf/dx/dear-reader.-i-need-your-help-desperately.htm

[Richard230]

NoiseBoy, the link that Protomech posted works for me.  I don't know what happened with the link that I posted.  Maybe I didn't do a good job of cutting and pasting.   

there's a full stop at the end of the link that needs to be removed....

here it is http://news.motorbiker.org/blogs.nsf/dx/dear-reader.-i-need-your-help-desperately.htm

Now I see what I did.  I thought the link was a sentence and put a period at the end of the link.  My bad.  (I have a tendency to put a period at the end of everything I write.)   

[Richard230]

Things are not getting any better for Mike.  I hope he can work out what to do next:   

http://news.motorbiker.org/blogs.nsf/dx/status-of-this-site-not-good.htm

[protomech]

Possibly it is an analytics tool failure - either the old numbers were reporting high or the new numbers are reporting low.

Either way, unless you can demonstrate an analytics failure (which may be little comfort if it was the old numbers that were wrong), you will have to change something as you say.

$300/mo sounds fairly steep, but I don't know your needs like you do. Managed wordpress hosts are available from a variety of vendors for about $20/month, and DIY can be had for substantially less.

If $300/mo in hosting costs is sinking the ship then (hopefully) it wasn't your full-time job, and switching to a less expensive host will continue to let you write and earn some money on the side.

[Mike Werner]

Possibly it is an analytics tool failure - either the old numbers were reporting high or the new numbers are reporting low.

Either way, unless you can demonstrate an analytics failure (which may be little comfort if it was the old numbers that were wrong), you will have to change something as you say.

$300/mo sounds fairly steep, but I don't know your needs like you do. Managed wordpress hosts are available from a variety of vendors for about $20/month, and DIY can be had for substantially less.

If $300/mo in hosting costs is sinking the ship then (hopefully) it wasn't your full-time job, and switching to a less expensive host will continue to let you write and earn some money on the side.

No, it's not an analytics issue since I run 2 of them, and both are more or less the same. Yes, unfortunately 300 is what you need to pay for Domino hosting, since it's an enterprise thing. I've got a few other things hosted there on Domino, so not only the news site. But I think I'll need to ween myself of and go fro Wordpress. I'm in discussion with one big site who will hopefully look after the migration, but that's the technical part, the important part is the legacy within Google since the URL structure will change...

No, not my main job, since I write for magazines, newspapers and other sites, but it's my baby...

[Biff]

I recently saw a thing about how Facebook (and other sites like youtoube) try and sort out "fake" likes and views with legitimate views.  Most of the people who are actually paid to browse the internet, creating "real" profiles on social media sites watching and liking videos, webpages and products are from the regions where your largest traffic volume was from (Egypt, Pakistan, Indonesia) .  I suspect that the majority of your traffic was these paid "likers" who would follow links and ads on Facebook to make their on-line profiles look legitimate so that their "likes" wouldn't get ignored as bots.

The video went on to indicate that legitimate paid promotion on Facebook was actually pretty counter-productive for small businesses, because you would get all of these "likers" to like your articles, but actually have very little interaction from them, so your new articles wouldn't get promoted with the real people who like your articles because the algorithms that Facebook uses to promote content to your friends and followers home pages is based on how much interaction those posts get from random people in your list of followers that Facebook selected to show the post.  If those random people don't stay on your page or like it, it won't get put on anybody else's page as something of interest.

-ryan

[Mike Werner]

True. Luckily I don't advertise much. I actually do have a large following in India and Pakistan since I do cover a lot of stuff coming from there. Pakistan can go crazy at times...

But you're right, with 181K followers on FB, you'd expect more people clicking on articles. Sometimes I can get 10-20, others will do 100K via facebook. Go figure. But recently, it has dried up. I've written to FB, but as usual, no reply (they also sometimes add meta data to my URL, which my site can't handle, so results in a 404 error).

I just hope FB get their act together...