backdraft7 - 8:30 pm on Apr 14, 2012 (gmt 0)

mav - now you're starting to understand. No changes in serps, no changes in traffic volume, just sudden drops in conversions, as if the visitors are Zombies, not buying humans. Of course I am not implying there are actual Zombies surfing the web, but for some reason the traffic seems extremely non targeted.

I was talking to a group of people at a supper club last night and they asked what I do for a living, I tried explaining it to them, which led to my trying to explain Google update upsets. These non experts instantly knew about periods when Google delivers some real garbage results and they are unable to find what they were looking for or useful sites suddenly disappear. It's during these periods that we WM's experience Zombie traffic.

Again, analysis is great, and you can crunch numbers until you're blue in the face trying to figure out the cause, but we will never know for sure. If Google is to earn any "user love" they need to soften the ill effects of their "quality updates". WebmasterWorld doesn't get much feedback from normal users, so last night was rather enlightening for me and backs up my suspicion that updates must unleash a certain level of chaos on their system.

The updates seem to be more of a brute force slash & burn for many mid level sites. The top 100,000 may not be affected (so you SEO pro's aren't seeing them), but beyond that all heck breaks loose.

Google wouldn't be much of a search engine with just 100,000 sites. That's why I believe they owe it to webmasters and uses alike to soften the blow in their continual efforts to clean house. Perhaps that would prompt everyone to start loving Google again. Everyone but the black hatters, which is fine.