What sources are these coming from? Do you have any analytics that can tell you where those visitors came from? Maybe someone wrote a bad link in an email or on a blog post. Or, something else. You need more detail to track down the problem.

I'm friends or at least aquainted with or heard of most of the webmasters of these sites. They've been pointing to my site for months if not years without a problem. I know that they are quality sites so I don't believe it's some sort of search engine penalty or anything like that.

When I visit the sites, and find the links that Google is talking about, they are in fact NOT linked to

http://www.mydomin.com/index.htm (as google webmaster tools says they are)

but they are linked to a specific page within my site or even my homepage with .html instead.

and when I click the links they pull up just fine.

I have google analytics on the site as well, so that I can see there is a dramatic drop in traffic.

Here is the data comparing May 1st-15th. with last month, April 1st-15th.

* 18,648
Visits

Previous: 28,581 (-34.75%)

* 62,684
Pageviews

Previous: 104,987 (-40.29%)

* 3.36
Pages/Visit

Previous: 3.67 (-8.49%)

Visits from Direct Traffic

2,164 Visits

Previous: 3,188 (-32.12%)

Visits from Referring Sites

4,658

Previous: 8,698 (-46.45%)

Visits from Search Engines

11,826

Previous: 16,695 (-29.16%)

You can see that my traffic is down substantially, but I can't begin to understand why. Is there something else I can be looking for?

The only thing I've found after spending a couple nights attacking the issue is that .htm vs html error. Somehow it seems that Google's crawlers are not identifiying the correct extension of my site.

Could this be some kind of form of hacking or anything like that?

I'm pretty green when it comes to this kinda stuff, so I have no idea where to even begin.

I've also seen seasonal trends in the past, and I was prepared to have lower traffic in the Spring/Summer months when the weather is better and less people spend time online, but I've never seen a drop this dramatic, occuring on a specific day (May1st) and my gut is telling me it's probably a combination of this seasonal drop with something else like an error or something.

I appreciate any help or ideas that you can offer,

Blessings,

Valerie

There are a lot of reasons for ups and downs in traffic coming through.

Is the traffic down for the sites that are referring to you? Is the information on your site relevant to trends in society and on the net? Do the sites that link to you link in the same ways they used to?

There are more things. Also, traffic levels are going down right now because of the warmer weather in Internet heavy parts of the world.

Sounds to me like someone over at Google might have messed up, and you're paying the price. As long as you have some sort of permanent 301 redirect, you should be o.k. Another problem on your end could be a typo on your robots.txt file. Make sure you don't have a missing letter off of your file extensions in there.

I am now having the same problem. Google seems to think some links pointing to my site are pointing to my site at virtualdreamer.com are actually pointing to virtualdreamer.com/index.htm .... I DON'T HAVE AN INDEX.HTM FILE... I have an index.html file. so I now have 77 unresolved errors.

You can use the google webmaster tools to see where those inbound links to the .htm file are coming from. Have you done this?

Yes, the backlinks all say http://www.virtualdreamer.com ... no backslash. Does that make a difference?

Is there a bad link on that site? That could be where everyone is coming from.

You might want to contact the site owner and ask them to fix it.

I did a fix simply by creating the 'fictional' index.htm with a redirect in the header to the index.html . I am wondering now if my hosts Homestead.com had something to do with it. Anyway, thx for the advice!