Macro - 12:07 am on Feb 2, 2004 (gmt 0)

Chelsea, there's no chastising.

The problem is that if you have expectations of free traffic, whether from the amount of SEO, or historic levels of free traffic, then you are more likely to be disappointed or elated at some pages going up or down in SERPS each time Google changes algo.

The problem is this expectation some webmasters have that they are *entitled* to free traffic.

I haven't analysed my keywords and haven't kept records of how they fared through the dances. Looking at the logs for one of my sites now I find that after Florida some really good pages seem to have dropped 50% in amount of Google traffic. About 40 other pages dropped in Google post Austin. BUT, overall my traffic from Google for the last week is 140% of what it was last year this time - like for like. I didn't realise it till I just checked. Traffic may drop at the next algo change, it may go up... just as long as Google's *intention* with each algo change is to improve the quality of the SERPS.