Whitey - 8:56 am on Sep 24, 2010 (gmt 0)

the performance of the site wasn't great so we optimised the DB and increased site load speed - traffic then went up to 5K per day in steady 500 chunks usually settling at a new level for about 3-4 days before gaining the next chunk. It has levelled out at 5K per day and has been steady for some weeks now.

I have seen sites with optimal loading times generate unlimited traffic very quickly after the remedy.

The same sites with poorly optimised DB's applied on otherwise very fast servers crashed with no recovery to a fraction of the original visitations and capped within a set range .

The effects of this are two fold , usability and indexing. Both can and will interact with Google's algo to affect rankings in some way. The correlation between available link juice on a site and it's traffic may well be part of this.

Not all throttling may show this , but this is my view of what's happening to some of this issue.

Can anyone else relate speed and indexing/link juice to this ?