Thank you for posting this . I had problem either similar or the same. I changed or adjusted my comment area. What does these profit?

I'm not sure of your question. But the botscout.com site checks whatever URL or ISP address to see if it is a real website/e-mail or if it is a (know) robot or spam site. This way you don't approve a comment by a robot/scammer/spammer to your site by mistake.

Excellent information Terry, thank you very much!

Hope it helps.

I really like hour blog. Thankful for post

Thank you for a great blog

Sometimes out of major frustrations a decent post arises, ey? Thanks for sharing!

Thank you just the same. I believe this dialog has given me a lot.

Ey there Craig... man is it awesome hearing from you!!!

Yup, I just went in and cleaned out the ones that might have been a wee bit spammy. But some of the 'boxes' were from comments left by folks from here at WA.

When I perused thru Webmaster Tools a while ago I found 31 hatom errors in the Structured Data and I think that each 'box' was included within these hatom errors.

Now I just gotta figure out how to clean up these errors. Some mention "Updated" and some mentioned "Updated" and "Author". It actually just looks like some 'fields' are missing and doesn't seem to me that they could possibly affect traffic in any way.

I think the thing that has me stumped more than anything else is the sudden drop in traffic by 90% on the 7'th of Nov. That's just nutso and it still hasn't returned. I did watch Jay's vid on 'Raising the SERP from the Dead' thanks to Gary (GHaze) and think that maybe it is time to give C&FC; a complete makeover. I just want to figure this out so that when I do the makeover I don't repeat this whopper! )-:

By the way Craig, the hatom errors that I'm getting are from various comments throughout the site ( http://goo.gl/Ex5kMv ), many of them on the first or home page.

Thank ya' again Craig for your help and especially all your help on the site in the past!

Randy

I agree, the " hatom errors" would be related to a drop in traffic because they've been there since the first day you started to use the theme.
I know the author of Weaver has no intention on making the changes to fix the errors as he posted about it here:
forum.weavertheme.com/discussion/4693/google-authorship-error

In regards to the traffic, you should check your analytics stats from before Nov. Figure out where the traffic normally comes from etc, is it mainly going to a few posts only.
Is it coming from Google or other sites.

You can then try figure out what's happened, perhaps you dropped a few spots for a few phrases.

I took a look at GA and here's some snaps...
Before Traffic http://take.ms/IjjLC
After Traffic http://take.ms/hdiQn
Before Landing http://take.ms/gYhlO
After Landing http://take.ms/rzfSA

I dunno Craig... it's kinda looking like a problem within my site and not a problem with Google, what do you think?
Thanks again, Craig
Randy

Thanks for your help, LC! I'm still pretty green at some of this. Where would I find the back end code? I might be able to find it with a little direction. I wouldn't be surprised if someone did sneak something past me.
An hour or so ago I went through Webmaster Tools>Search Appearance>Structured Data and found 31 hatom errors so there might be quite a few more than I thought.
Like I said, I think I can remove the links if I can get a bit of direction. Thanks again for your help!

Easiest way is you need FTP access to your site.
Next way takes a lot longer. You need to access your files from the servers C-Panel.

Either way you go to your File or Http folder and open it up. Then from there you locate the file for your comments. Then find the comment itself and edit it.

Since I don't your sites structure or what host you are using, that's the best I can give.

It seems intimidating, but it is rather easy and simple to do.
I'm off to bed. I'll get back with you if you still have problems.

Thank ya' again LC... I'm using WordPress, Weaver 2 theme and am hosted here at WA. I have access to the ftp thru Filezilla. I'll see if I can go in and find the comments.

After playing around a bit more with Webmaster Tools, I found that under 'Search Appearance'>'Structured Data', I have 31 hatom errors and it looks like everything from the Rich Snippets Tool are found among these 31 errors. Now, I just have to figure out how to correct these errors.

I'll take a look and see if I can access them through the ftp as you suggested.

Again, thank you for your help here!

I'm not a wordpress user. I used it a long time ago, but chose a different system to build my sites with. I also use a Mac with Transmit for my FTP/SFTP connections.
The file structure should be similar and the code is going to be the same as well. Either PHP, HTML, Java, etc.
Did you use a Rich Snip generator system to create the snippet code? Or, did you place the code in yourself?
Seeing that the errors are spread through all the snippets I'm thinking it has to do with a snippet generator, and not through a comment code injection.

No, I sure didn't use it. Well, not that I know of. Is it a plugin? Thx

I know of plug-ins that will do rich snippets. I had one a while ago that would install it's own hidden links. I've had other plug-ins/extensions that would do hidden links as well as place their own ads.
Between those and the extension I now use I used Googles Rich Snippet creator.

If I can figure out the reason for the sudden drop in traffic and fix it, I plan on doing a makeover of the site and revisit training on Rich Snippets. I'm hoping to get it all dialed in at that time. I know that getting the snippets right is extremely important, I just have to get the whole site repaired first. Thank ya' LC... sure do appreciate it!

Yup, actually I had reviewed and approved them... that's what's got me puzzled! Thanks.