I went from averaging 1600 visits a day, which was consistent for years (with a gradual rise) to suddenly 900 visits a day after April 6. I have an archive of over 1000 entries, but they're all still accessible as far as I can see - I just don't understand how this happened? It's potentially a serious blow to a business that's based on traffic. Other sites on the same server have not had any drop at all.

Looking for the license plate of the truck that hit me. Any ideas? I'd be totally appreciative.

Neil
www.cooltownstudios.com

And why exactly do you think this is a problem with MT?
One might even think that you were trolling for clicks.

Sigh, no, I'm not trolling for clicks. There are more effective ways to build traffic than the three or four clicks posting here would produce

Seriously, if your Movable Type-only website traffic dropped by 40-50% overnight after several years of steady traffic, what would you do? Posting a question here is really the only thing I can think of. If anyone has better ideas I'm all for it. Maybe someone experienced the same problem? Maybe Google changed their algorithm and most of my traffic all along was coming from comment spam attempts. Who knows. I have no idea. I only included the link in case that was relevant to anyone who could help.

Come to think of it, I disabled hotlinking to my 1000+ images (tied to 1000+ entries) a couple of months ago, and just noticed that none of the images are showing up anymore in Google searches... and half my traffic was indeed based on image searches. Would disabling hotlinking also disable Google indexing images?

This type of question is definitely more appropriate for a forum related to general web-mastery, as it is not specific to Movable Type (and is certainly not a "Bug or Odd Behavior" of Movable Type). If you're interested in how search engines might be impacting your site, then a forum or list specfic to search enginges/SEO would be the best place to ask this question.

Wow, these responses are really cold. I'm just posting this to make sure that losing half my readership overnight on a 100% Movable Type site is NOT a Movable Type issue, that's all. It was certainly odd in my opinion. Maybe my archives weren't posting, maybe the traffic was coming from comment spam all along, maybe...

Anyway, responses here have not been very helpful, and I think I've figured it out myself. It would have been nice to hear, "Hey, I had the same issue, and I thought it was MT at first, but it turned out to be..." Maybe this post will help someone else - isn't that the idea?

It's just very discouraging to hear, "It's not our problem - go somewhere else."... especially when I'm just trying to determine if it really is indeed 'not your problem'. The group used to be so much more personal - I guess this is what happens when you grow into a larger entity.

Oh well, at least I know what to expect

It almost couldn't possibly be. Other than maybe if MT weren't posting your content, which you would probably have known about and mentioned up front. Did you check?
If the traffic were coming from comment spam or anything else, it would always have been there for you to check in your stats, never mind that large a chunk of your traffic coming from it should have been obvious. Again: not MT's fault.



Well, it's not Movable Type's, problem. All I did was ask why you seemed to be under the impression this was MT's fault, given that the assumption made no obvious sense(likely why nobody had the same issue), and yet you posted it in a bugs forum.
Sarah's response was perfectly polite and told you where you could go to more appropriately address whatever the actual issue might be. While you may occasionally get some more general information here in the context of other responses, the forum has a specific topic, and you shouldn't get all bent out of shape when your outside questions get bounced. Webmasterforums isn't going to answer your MT questions, either.