Forum Moderators: open
Dave
Oh well, I am about to lauch a completely overhauld CSS version of the site anyway. Maybe that will show me some love.
Checked my sites, servers, and cart; they are all working fine.
Today (September 13th) I have noticed a 75% drop in traffic accross all my sites. Is there a holiday today... did I miss something... Is anyone else seeing this?
Every month this year has been better than the preceeding one in terms of overall visits as well as uniques and referrals per search engine. Sales have mirrored the trend.
September is shaping up to be the Mother of All Traffic Surges- across the board from Google, MSN, Yahoo, Ask Jeeves, plus the smaller search sites- again as measured by page hits and uniques. No tricks, no automation, all clean pages.
All my positions are holding steady or improving- save the odd one here and there. I've discovered more keywords and am jumping into those waters as well, so my overall traffic for September should be much higher than forecasted at current levels.
The only sites I have seen lose traffic are the 100% redesigned sites that I have not yet cleaned up.
What does that mean?
Check your ranking on alexa, to see if you are moving up or down. Then look at your competitors to see what is happening with them. If they are up and you down, you know you've goofed.
Don't worry about the negative impact of google's improved spidering. It is a good thing. Take the opportunity to tweak your pages and see results within 48hrs.
Good luck.
Don't rely on this, it is ONLY based on a VERY limited amount of data. I know of one site that gets 20-50 hits per DAY and is ranked at about 20,000
Dave
"if you used the star "&9733;" then your traffic would be way up :)"
If you put that code into your title then a star shows up in the google results. Looks quite good, but google may not like you for it.
Look at [webmasterworld.com...]
There was a thread a few weeks or so back which talked about using special characters/ symbols as 'highlights' in eg your title - symbols like the 'star' character - (solid 97433, outline 9734 etc - see a list of special characters eg [bigbaer.com...] ) It was believed that the symbols would (mistakenly) be perceived by some searchers as having been inserted by google, as an 'award' special 'pick' site, star site etc.
And so the theory went that more people would click on the link.....
Chris_D
Not a subscriber to the theory, just explaining it....
Don't worry about the negative impact of google's improved spidering. It is a good thing. Take the opportunity to tweak your pages and see results within 48hrs.
Thanks for the observation. Think I'll just wait to tweak until the Googlers complete most of their tinkering with
their "algorithms".
(re: Alexa) Don't rely on this, it is ONLY based on a VERY limited amount of data.
This is true. A huge amount of the data is relevant for Korean surfers. There are many people on WW who believe in it- I'm not telling people that they should not use it.
Alexa had a sideline for selling the data as Market Research but nobody was willing to pay for analysis sourced from the toolbar so they closed up that shop.
I myself don't use it, and I discourage clients from using it. Instead I focus on my actual traffic metrics, and maintaing them on an upward trend.
[edited by: jasonc at 8:58 pm (utc) on Sep. 14, 2003]
According to Alexa, their pageview and traffic figures are estimates. There is nothing reliable about an estimate.
According to Alexa, a large portion of their users reside in Korea.
Even digitalghost has this to say about Alexa:
I ban Alexa's bot and ignore their stats for any practical purposes.
There are many people in the industry that will agree that the Alexa toolbar is closer to a toy and about as useful as a fortune cookie.
If that is news to you, I would suggest you re-read the above mentioned thread because it's not news to a lot of people.
Combine that with typical low traffic in general for the end of summer/back to school/one last BBQ pool party and I can only hope that we're back in the high life again tomorrow.
There are many people in the industry that will agree that the Alexa toolbar is closer to a toy and about as useful as a fortune cookie.
I second that! I thought it was pretty cool when I first came across it. Then I looked at where "visitors go" It was counting all my webmail box visits. Tossed that sucker fast enough.
Traffic? Up up and away the last few months thanks to the great tips from the fine folks here at Webmaster World. When's the next google update? It still lives the way I see it.
Coming back to the original question. No traffic has not dropped off. And if it has dropped off, you need to relook at your search engine marketing startegy.
Do you think Google would penalize sites using "&9733;"?
The star was used (by some, but not I) to make their listing stand-out on Google. Personally I think it's a waste of a keyword and looks spammy. It was agreed by most that Google would not punish for this, but perhaps prevent the star from showing and show "&9733;" It would seem that Google *might* already be doing this at times.
For me the bottom line is, the risk far out-weighs any *possible* gain.
Dave
Dave, I have to agree with you here. It seems Google has already started filtering out the star.
