It's unusual but something similar happened in the past.
Possible sources:
- Outing on the site (observed for 2 hours on Saturday)
- Outing on youtube - If the vids are slow, the number of page views will strongly drop because thos who are interested can't view the vids - They will access the page, see the vid doesn not load or stream and leave the site with just one page view.
- Penalization on automatic blog posting and/or content duplication
- Other
What is stunning is that I just launched new blogs with automatic blog posting, which means that the site is ipdated much more frequently overall.
Logically, the result to these actions should have been the exact opposite!
What is observed is a drop in traffic which simply shows that on that scale, this specific strategy not only does not work, it actually generates the exact opposite results.
Now, this experiment is too localized and short to give an answer 100% accurate.
the chances that something like that is actually happening and that there is some from of penalization happening is relatively small.
I say, this because I can't conceive how such a penalization would actually be set up.
It is possible as well that with frequent updating of the site, this is similar to some sandbox effect (???) that was observed before when changing adwords campaigns or posting a new site map.
In that case, what is observed now would not be a penalization but some sandbox effect.
conclusion:
What is the action to be taken if any?
Is there any long term strategy to apply that would avoid this in the future?