I don’t talk much about what Gayla and I wrestle with from day to day to keep the site up and running (mostly me) and improving (mostly her). Some of it is fun, but a lot of it isn’t. Well, in 2011 we descended into site owner-operator hell. And in 2012 we fought our way back out.

Two-thousand eleven started out great. Site traffic had been growing strongly month after month, largely due to search engines, and continued to do so. In mid-2010 search engines were sending us about 7,500 visitors a day. On January 24, 2011 we received over twice that, 15,218. Total site visits were over 18,000.

Then Google revised its algorithm in late February to combat people gaming the system, then revised it again a few months later. We hadn’t been gaming the system in the slightest–I’d never consciously optimized the site for SEO, legitimately or otherwise–but somehow we got caught in the crossfire. (My suspicion: the revised Google doesn’t see tables of numbers as content, and might also see pages that are largely the same, differing only by a few words (such as model names) as duplicate content.) By October, search engines were sending only about 5,000 visitors a day. As the saying goes among site owners, “Google giveth, Google taketh away.”

All through this time Gayla had been working to get the redesigned site out. I thought it would take a week or two, as I’d personally implemented the previous redesign in just a few days. This time, it took ten months. The site had grown much larger and more complex. The code I’d written wasn’t entirely conventional. Gayla had to rework a lot of it. And MANY big changes were made to improve site navigation and functionality (“My Garage,” wishlists, reliability comparions, etc.). You can imagine what some days were like around here…

In November site traffic started to recover. Then, in December, the redesign finally launched. Human visitors immediately appreciated the improved navigation. Search engines did not. The new site also had more than a few bugs. Fixing one often broke something else.

On top of this, I finally consulted an SEO specialist. Her recommendations were sound, and purely legit, but she hadn’t realized that we were using one variable in two different ways. She advised us to instruct search bots to ignore pages with this variable name. We did, and bots started ignoring about half the site.

On December 16th, 2011, search traffic fell to 2,610, barely one-sixth the high. Gayla rushed to fix the situation, while still fighting bug after bug. Last year this time was not happy.

Within a month, Gayla had largely turned the situation around. Search traffic rose back up into the 8,000-range. Far from where we wanted to be, but out of continuous crisis mode. Bug reports and complaints about site navigation had also become much less frequent.

Through the year traffic rose and fell as search engines continued to make revisions (and we made the occasional blunder in our mission to keep fixing and improving). We were Sisyphus. We’d get the rock to the top of the hill, only to have it roll down again.

Still, Gayla was able to shift more and more of her attention to site improvements. In February, she upgraded the Car Reliability Survey, making it possible to respond for up to a full year (though quarterly is still much better for your memory and the accuracy of our stats). In March, she added the ability to post comments on many site pages. In June, she launched a mobile site with pages for the reliability stats and I started posting car reviews to the site. In August, she dramatically upgraded the gas mileage survey and added it to the mobile site. In September, we added specs pages for many non-US models and made it possible for our international visitors to convert cars’ specs into their local units. In October, Gayla upgraded the “Why (Not) This Car?” owner reviews. And these are only the major improvements. We’ve also made countless small tweaks along the way.

No matter what happened, I kept the survey on track quarter after quarter, providing four updates on time, each based on about 25,000 survey responses. We had a few bugs, but were able to keep any of them from impacting the quality of our reliability stats. On the contrary, through it all we made some survey and process changes that improved the quality of these stats, and will be making more.

Currently, we’re on an upswing. Organic search traffic is approaching 10,000 per day, and total visits 13,000 (with some days over these marks). Combined with site improvements and a glitchy new VPS OS update (thank you, webhost!), this increased traffic overloaded the VPS, and the site started going down multiple times a day. To fix this, in December TrueDelta moved to a dedicated server. If pages are loading much faster now, this is why. Over 50 cars are added to the survey on a typical day, sometimes over 80, and on the 29th we passed the 100,000-car mark. It’s feeling like December 2010 all over again, but with a much-improved site and additional upgrades in the pipeline.

Add it all up, and December 31, 2012, is a much, much happier day here than December 31, 2011. Though much of it was quite tough, it retrospect we had an excellent year. There will no doubt be more tough times ahead. But we survived 2011, and we now know we could do it again (though we’d much prefer not to).

We hope you have had an excellent 2012 as well. Here’s to an even better 2013, for all of us!