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.

Wow. I wonder how they justify that as a non-evil action?

me