Something very strange has happened to one of my sites, and I just don't understand it. Up until recently, Free-Webhosting.info was getting about 170 visitors a day, now its suddenly dropped to around 20! I can't see what has changed. I'm still listed on Google in the same place as before, my top referrers still have their links in place.

Its even apparent using more than one statistics program:

Proprietary software:

sday count(*) sum(pagecount) avg(pagecount)
1 127 534 4.2047
2 98 432 4.4082
3 128 439 3.4297
4 176 767 4.3580
5 173 620 3.5838
6 173 754 4.3584
7 220 814 3.7000
8 195 758 3.8872
9 249 1031 4.1406
10 126 533 4.2302
11 118 401 3.3983
12 21 146 6.9524
13 24 115 4.7917

Sitemeter:

                  --- Visits this Week ---                  
       Day
Hour   8/7    8/8    8/9   8/10   8/11   8/12   8/13   Total
---- ----- ------ ------ ------ ------ ------ ------ -------
 1       0      5      2      4      7      0      1      19
 2       0      9      2      0      8      0      0      19
 3       2      0      0      1      4      4      0      11
 4      14      2      2      3      5      0      0      26
 5       3      2      4      2      2      0      0      13
 6       7      2     13      3      3      0      0      28
 7       4      8      0      3      1      0      0      16
 8       2      5      5      5      8      0      0      25
 9       4      3      8      1      2      0      0      18
10       3      4      7      1      1      0      1      17
11       5      7      6     15      0      0      0      33
12       7      8      4      2      1      2      0      24
13       4      5      4      6      1      0      0      20
14       6      4      3      7      1      0      3      24
15       5      6      6      3      1      0      1      22
16       5      1      8      5      1      0      1      21
17       8      6      4      2      1      0      1      22
18      22      5     11      5      1      1      1      46
19      13      4      2      7      2      0      0      28
20       6     10      1      4      0      0      0      21
21       7      7      3      4      2      0      0      23
22       4      6      2      2      0      1      1      16
23       2      2      7      3      0      1      0      15
24       5      5      2      2      0      1      0      15
    ------ ------ ------ ------ ------ ------ ------ -------
       138    116    106     90     52     10     10     522

Can anyone explain what might have happened? AFAIK the server hasn't been down in this time......

Hrmm... was google the only source of traffic?

Not the only source but pretty iimportant... maybe 75%-90% of the visitors were Google ones.

The traffic seems to have gone up a little again now. Its 55 for today, and I'm just half way through the 'official' day, so hopefully whatever it was has stopped.

Still doesn't explain what happened though...

are you sure your site did not go down at all throughout the day? Just a thought.

Also what stats package are you using? With most stats packs you can view referrers for each day which would be a great way to find out who is sending you this traffic in the first place.