scottsonline - 4:42 am on Apr 11, 2012 (gmt 0)

ET zone US ecommerce site.

Traffic erratic as were the SERPS. I got a lot of weird results in my searches today. Look at your time on site for google organic visitors. Ours dropped to 40% of normal for a couple of 3-4 hour periods today. Why? Because google was sending us traffic for terms like "how to use a widget while sleeping" and dumping users on random product pages where none of those terms were mentioned. We don't offer any how to type of products or information. We got clicks today on how to use a feminine product from google? Really bizarre stuff that is unrelated in every way. But striking is the enormous drop in time on site for specifically google visitors only and no wonder with just some of the keywords we saw.

I'm seeing the same errors on my own personal searches. Whenever we see these oddities like we did about 15 days ago we get a boost of bing coversions and today was no different. Normally this corrects during the next day but it is really frustrating to users. I found a great article this morning on a major magazine site via google. Tonight it was gone from Google entirely and I had to find it through Facebook with tens of thousands of likes. Searching for the page itself yielded no results. This absolute authority article had maybe 5 links out to other sites. I can't help but wonder if this constant flux we see is the result of major pages coming and going?

I love the rapid pickup of new content on google. What seems to be very poor right now is their ability to ingest it without creating massive serp hiccups as the data feeds into the index.