Anyone Notice That Domain and Minisite Traffic Appears to Have Peaked March 2009

Noticing a steady decline since March 2009

[trader]

Has anyone noticed the traffic going to their minisites and domains seems to have peaked March 2009 and is on a fairly steep and steady decline over past 3 months. A large number of my stats reflects that traffic-top and subsequent decline.

What makes the declines more surprising is a good percentage of my traffic comes from links and typeins, which would not seem to be strongly related to the SEs.

I cant figure out what has caused this to happen but can only guess it's somehow related to changes Google may have made to their algorithm several months ago. Can anyone confirm that or know/guess about other possible reasons?

[IanTurner]

Weather - good weather always equals less traffic as people are outside rather than sitting at home on their PCs.

[edited by: IanTurner at 9:58 am (utc) on July 6, 2009]

[Webwork]

If it's minisites I can see how an algo change could have an effect.

If it's direct nav traffic then it's a bit more difficult to understand a precipitous drop, unless you are being "given less traffic credit" for the traffic rated as suspect, doubtful, dubious, etc. Therefore the "actual numbers" are being discounted. One more version os smart pricing.

[IanTurner]

Even with direct nav traffic I would expect seasonal trends to be an issue - for instance winter sports traffic would definitely cut off seriously as of March.

Also direct nav traffic, even if it were dubious, would only show as down if it really was. Log file analysis would show the actual traffic to the sites regardless of quality. (One potential cause of an actual reduction in dubious traffic would be large botnets being taken out - but the sort of scale of botnet reduction it would take to cause a precipitous drop would surely have made the news.)

[Webwork]

The "school's out, a/k/a good weather effect" accounts for a drop from mid-May (college student) and mid-June (kids and parents with kids). A drop starting in April is arriving ahead of the "school's out" effect.

[trader]

Thanks for the feedback. Since traffic to my sites have generally been on a long and steady up-slope for a long time (including same time periods in other years) and my domains are also real diverse I am fairly positive seasonal factors and the domain categories are not involved.

After thinking about this I now believe it's strongly related to the IE browser or Google search using the suggested sites feature with their recent upgraded versions.

The suggested sites also appear much more advanced to me vs earlier versions. That would seem to detract from typeins since as you typein the url (or the keywords in the url's) you see various suggested sites (including a lot of authority sites) and may tend to click on one rather than proceed with the full typein.