tedster - 7:17 am on Sep 13, 2012 (gmt 0)

There are plenty of sites that have seen increased traffic. You just won't see too many of them being very vocal about it on here.

Agreed. I'll try to give an overview of the sites I've been involved with. On the average, most are up, second steady, and in third place are the problems. This is a mixed up collection of major business, small business, and one person business. They use informational, e-commerce, lead-generation and advertising models.

1. Most have stayed steady through Panda/Penguin Updates.
   
2. A few have grown with Panda/Penguin updates.
   
3. One long-term client has taken a 10% income loss after Penguin.
   
4. Some asked me for help after Panda or Penguin problems hurt them.
   
5. Above-The-Fold hurt one site.
   
6. Unnatural backlinks hurt none of them.
   
7. Changes in Google Suggest (which have been common) account for a lot of both losses and gains. I check Suggestions both when creating copy and when significant traffic changes of any kind happen.
   
8. Another common issue with changes in search traffic occurs when a search result's balance shifts between navigational and transactional.
   
9. Although we've barely discussed it here, I also see significant changes (up and down) with the growing need for a plus sign [+] to ensure that a word is included in the SERP. This is a kind of "update" or tweak that seems to be happening a good bit in recent months. Some longer tail query phrases are generating bizarre search results because of these changes, with lost rankings for pages that actually DO contain all the keywords.