scottsonline - 6:54 am on Mar 6, 2012 (gmt 0)

Gadget same pattern on a non pandalized site. Traffic stays the same but the quality of traffic is all over the place.

It's one of two things:

1. Google is being fair in sending all of us spurts of traffic
2. Google is broken and the code is inadvertently cycling users to the wrong sites.

I think it's an attempt at 1 but in reality 2. They are trying to be equitable which in itself would reduce the driving forces to be #1 in the serps as it wouldn't matter. But the formula isnt right yet so we get bursts of buyers and then junk. If your normal busy day is wednesday but your site is set to get a burst on Saturday you're in trouble. Sometimes like an eclipse it all lines up and you get tons of buyers. Most of the time you're on the dark side of the moon wondering why a 10% increase in google traffic resulted in an 80% drop in sales.

The economy is tailing with petrol prices rising too.