Need to know reason behind traffic surge.

[sleidia]

Hi guys ;)

I have a site that has little traffic.
It's a highly dynamic site with metatags, keywords, page titles, etc. created on the fly and always changing.

Then, from october to december, I got 4 times more traffic than ever.
Since everything is so dynamic on this site, I don't know what was the combination of title/metatags/content that made the increase possible.
Looking at the site activity (with awstat) gives me little clue :(

So, how could I find what exactly caused this better traffic?

Thanks for the help :)

[sleidia]

BTW, this traffic surge was from people coming from google searches.
So, something occured that caused a better ranking on Google.

[cgrantski]

Have you been tracking your ranks? That could help you understand if it's purely rank changes, or a surge in interest coming from more people searching on those terms.

I don't know AWStats but if it has a "search terms" report you might be able to see which terms are causing the surge.

If not, and if you have access to the logs, you'll find the same information in the raw logs in the referrer field. The referrer will be google and there'll be a parameter "q=" followed by the search term the person used on google to bring up your listing.

The URL field (the requested file) for those same hits should give an idea of which of your own site's landing page query parameters were in play at the time of those hits, if your site's constant changes are, in fact, refelected in the query string.

Because AWStats is so limited, it's likely that you will only understand this phenomenon by examining the raw logs.

Good luck and congratulations on the traffic bump.

[webboy1]

Has the surge continued? If so, it might be that Google crawled your site and now recognises more pages than it used to, rather than it being exisitng listed pages ranking higher.

We've seen this happen across a lot of sites. So if linkage throughout site is improved etc and pages in 2nd, 3rd or even 4th directories are easier to get to, then Google may well crawl them. This in turn increases the chances of your site being found for a wider variation of searches etc.

Indeed, it doesn't actually require improved linking for this to happen. Sometimes the engines will simply follow a link they might not have followed before and show this by adding more pages from your site to it's results set.

One way to check this is the simple "site:" command in Google i.e. search for Site:www.yoursite.com.

[cgrantski]

Great idea. This would be a really good thing to do on a regular basis --- in the future, being able to compare "now" to "before" might help explain things.

[centime]

if the tags are changing constantly, perhaps there is a portion of your site that google hasn't respidered for a while, so it got digested properly for once :)

spiders do weave curious paterns an its sometimes a pain getting them to re-index re cache everything

[sleidia]

Thanks a lot for your replies :)

Well, unfortunately, the surge lasted only 2 months.
Starting from december, I definitively lost this mysterious traffic gain :(

So, what I really want to do is bring back the stuff that made my site better ranked. But it is difficult because I don't know what made it better.

Yes, Awstat can show me Search Keyphrases and Search Keywords but it doesn't tell me how and why those keywords managed to reach my site.

Is there something else I could do?
I wish I could get a picture of my site when google ranked it better.

[centime]

the above kinda confirms it for me

if you was using google analytics, this would be fairly simple, i dunno awstats

does it store keywords, visitor sources, for up to a year ?

you gotta have static content, even if its loaded on a database

[sleidia]

Thanks centime :)

I didn't know about Google Analytics, so I just signed up today, thanks to you all.

Too bad I didn't do it earlier :(

[Insomniak]

Is your site less then a year old? I usually see alot of ups and downs for at least the first year as sites become established.