johnhh - 10:13 pm on Oct 10, 2012 (gmt 0)

@SevenCubed

I'll go so far as to speculate that when a site exceeds their algorithm's capability of containing it within their predefined limits they will write an exception to push it back down

Interesting - I reached the same conclusion a few days ago after analysing our visitor numbers against Google updates ( all of them ).

We seem to have a 'ceiling', once we exceed that ceiling we crash and burn, as we work on the site we raise the visitor numbers slowly to, or above the 'ceiling', the algo(s) notice and the cycle repeats.

Also we have days of little variation in visitor number as if the algo can't decide what to do for a while...

_{Not sure this is the right thread for this comment - which is why I didn't post the comment earlier}