There is a strange problem with this site at the moment.

As regular readers (Hah! Are there any?) will know, I don’t post here very often and when I do, it is mostly technical stuff.  Dull, boring but hopefully useful for people who have had the same technical problems I have managed to fix.

Because of its nature, virtually all traffic to the site is from search engines, with Google representing about 99% of all searches.  The traffic levels aren’t exactly setting the world on fire, but there is a steady constant stream of visitors.

That all changed on the 25th last month.  For no apparent reason, all traffic ceased.  I did some quick checks, and sure enough, the site itself was fine, but there wasn’t a single referral from Google.  I tried a few terms that people had used, and this site didn’t appear anywhere in the search results, where normally they would have been very near the top of the results.

I checked a couple of blacklist sites (http://vebtools.com/google-banned-checker/ and http://onlinealley.com/seotools/googlebannedchecker/) and sure enough, both reported that the site was blacklisted.

My next port of call was http://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/ where I did a thorough check of the site.  However Google themselves were saying that not only was the site not blacklisted but that there were no problems with it.

I tried searching for the site using terms that I knew should rank highly (“the other fellow”, “pipe and a keyboard”) but the ranking was appalling.  When I did enter the site via Google, it was quite happy about it – no warnings about a potential treat or anything.

A couple of days ago, the situation righted itself.  Suddenly traffic started flowing again and 99% of it was from Google.  24 hours later, it stopped again.

The graph above is taken from Google’s Webmaster area showing traffic that Google sends to the site. 

I am stumped!