[DanielBMarkham]

My wife and I have a small site that serves up hamburger casserole recipes ( http://hamburger-casserole-recipes.com/ )

She was getting over 15K visits per month -- the site made almost nothing, but we enjoyed creating it together, watching the numbers and responding to emails. And the numbers kept climbing -- at least until a couple of weeks ago.

I noticed the traffic numbers starting to drop. I was wondering why. I thought about digging into it but put it off. Perhaps this new feature at DDG did it? If so, fine with me. They doing a much more awesome job than we did.

The only reason I mention it is because this is the type of question that if you knew enough, you could find the answers in SEO-land. But for a little mom-and-pop site, lots of times you don't have that luxury. You're hot for a few months then suddenly it all dies off and you never know why. You could be adding the best content you can and still all the visitors disappear. No skin off of my back in this particular case, but this has to be frustrating for lots of folks -- especially if your site is a startup instead of something silly like recipes.

Way cool UI! I think we'll add it -- looks like it might be a nice fit.

[icey]

Unless you got a huge amount of your traffic from DDG, I would imagine the recent update to Google's search algorithm (Panda 2.2) had more to do with the dropoff in your traffic than Punchfork did.

[Joakal]

Sounds like no analytics if you're relying on hits purely. It might not be too late to check how users find the website. Look at trends.google.com, alexa.com, etc for related searches. Might also be a good idea to start webmaster accounts on search engines (Google and Bing at least I know of).

The website name is also quite a handful to remember ;)

[DanielBMarkham]

When we put it together, if you searched for "hamburger casserole recipes" all you got were sites that tried to trick you into signing up for recurring cell phone charges or stuff like that. She thought it would be nice to make a plain site that helped folks (our idea of "plain" was not so good back then!) We figured using our target phrase as the domain name would at least tell people what we were about.

We make maybe 20 bucks a month from the site, and domain renewal is something like 140/year for all the major TLDs, so it's not a high priority right now. The only reason I shared this to try to point out how easy it is to lose traffic and not know why.

If I wanted to chase it, I'd go to SEOMoz and check out the backlinks and competition -- did anything change over the past month? Are other sites getting a bunch of links for some reason?

Thanks for the great tips! We have a Webmaster account on Google. Didn't know there were options also on Bing. Looking at Google Analytics today, we're still at 13K visitors for the previous month, which is about a 20% decline. It's all still search engine traffic, mostly from Google and mostly for "tater tot casserole" Go figure. Is tater tot casserole so popular? Why? These kinds of questions drive you crazy, because many times when you make a site for your startup or topic -- especially if it has a lot of pages, you get all this data from web analytics and it's a bitch trying to make some kind of meaning out of it.

Folks are still spending on average more than a minute on the site, which means they are taking time to read the recipes and get some value. That's all that counts for us.

BTW, if any of you startup guys want to go into recipes, good luck. She has had this site, with lots of traffic, for a couple of years now, and hell if we can figure out how to monetize it. We did books, kitchenware, magazines, AdSense -- finally writing our own ebook. Right now we're thinking about coupons or some other giveaway product, but I don't have my hopes up. Recipes, at least to me, looks like an income-free zone. One of the reasons we did the ebook was to provide a totally ad-free place to keep track of recipes. We're operating under the principle that people who are cooking hamburger casseroles probably aren't needing anything else at all, at least at the moment they're online.

Still, we did it to make something people want that can scale, so no matter how it turns out, we helped people (as evidenced by our emails and traffic stats) and we can learn something from it.

[nopassrecover]

Domain renewal is something like $140 per year !?

I hope you mean web hosting.

//edit: Ah you mean for the .com + .org + .net etc. Still can't see this being 140 but makes more sense

[blehn]

I don't really see the relevance of your comment, perhaps because it's mostly incoherent nonsense, but I wonder if you posted mainly to have a high-traffic inbound link to yet another one of your SEO spam blogs.

I'm not sure exactly what your business is (a one-man Demand Media?), but it's getting old fast.