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I am talking about traffic of nearly 7 k from google everyday and hence its a sizable decrease.
Looking for early answers on how we could check the things
[news.google.com...]
for the record: about 200 new pages have been added to the index in the past 2-3 days and GB visits me daily so...
[edited by: walkman at 11:13 pm (utc) on Aug. 7, 2004]
The topic of the thread is Google referrals dropping while still holding positioning.
Is anyone else noticing a decrease in google traffic and an increase in Y and MSN referrals?
First, thank you for reminding everyone the topic of the thread.
I have several hundred domains for which I look through the referrer info every month. The traffic from Google has decreased with a direct relation to the loss of Google's market share.
I have found that Yahoo and MSN intentionally make it confusing to differentiate sponsors from organic results, so traffic to my network has gone down despite high SERPs and I am feeling pressure to buy ads on Yahoo and MSN.
Early in this thread you posted the "theory that the knob is getting twisted away from authority sites is as good as any" as the reason traffic was dropping from G. europeforvisitors and BigDave responded they didn't believe this to be true because their authority sites were not experiencing a drop in traffic from G.
You then posted you are "more interested in hearing from the folks whose Gooogle traffic has dropped (the topic of the thread), than from those who are pleased that their Google traffic is stable or growing."
How is it you can say you aren't interested in others posting their experience, when their authority sites are not showing what you believe (or theorize) might be occurring? Are you only "interested" when someone else's experience agrees with your theory?
And how is it you can imply their posts are not "the topic of the thread" - unless you believe anyone whose experience does not agree with your (posted in this thread) theory must be off-topic?
I started following this thread *because* there was mention authority sites seemed to be experiencing a drop in traffic from G. I'd describe my site as an authority (at least my SERPs would indicate G believes it is) and wanted to investigate if I should be seeing, or expect to see, traffic from G dropping. I'm finding there has been a shift in the SERPs of some competitors, but my positions have held steady with only slight upward and downward changes - and there is no drop in traffic from G.
I don't believe my posting this to be off-topic as I think others in this thread might be interested in knowing some, with authority-type sites, are not seeing dropped traffic from G. That there is a drop in traffic from G is obvious from the numerous posts in this thread attesting to it. However, those theorizing it being due to a twisting of the knob back from authority sites might want to look elsewhere for the reason.
I noticed though, that my old machine, that I use for backwards capability testing of my sites, got a hold of a Browser Help Object that was modifying the results that google had displayed. Anyone that picked up that BHO object would have their results tainted, thus altering traffic patterns.
If you lost position, then of course you lose traffic.
There are plenty of threads with people discussing how or why they lost position, maybe you can find some clues in those threads.
In this thread we are looking for input about increases or decreases in google traffic for those who HAVE NOT lost positioning.
My site still sits at the top of the SERPS but most of the sites that used to be top ten have vanished and in their place is some very poor, off topic and spammy results.
I have an older site that is one of the authorities in my industry, since most of the other authority sites in my industry have vanished, my google traffic has decreased, so have my adword impressions. Not just today (Saturday) but over the last couple of weeks I have watched the decline.
Maybe the title should be:
"Is Google Losing Market Share?"
[edited by: my3cents at 12:12 am (utc) on Aug. 8, 2004]
As BigDave points out, any and all data is relevant - from those affected and those not affected. I stand corrected. Pointing me to the Google guidelines and telling me to build well rounded sites is probably less helpful for me, but may be helpful for others.
The edge in my posts is because I sort of bristle at posts suggesting that anyone who sees their G referrals fall somehow isn't following the rules, or building well-rounded sites. That doesn't seem fair, especially as EFV and BigDave are not familiar with all of the sites that have been affected.
I agree...
The one very unlikely thing I haven't seen mentioned is that Google has been experimenting much more than usual the past few days with redirecting/tracking URLs in the serps. It would make sense I suppose if people seeing these drops had weak statistics programs which were showing some Google referers as unknown or bookmarks or whatever.
Just an algo tweak can mean the difference between someone paying the bills or not.
I just hope things improve or I might have to get a "real" job flippin burgers.
Statements like the above simply bring us back to the "eggs in one backet" syndrome that so many have posted about in the past.
The fact is, if your income is (primarily) dependent on the free search engine traffic you can garner, you are in for ALOT of sleepless nights in this business.
Really, what is to prevent a link farm from adding your site without your knowledge and getting you dropped when you did nothing to deserve it.
Doesn;t happen. Never been proven. Pure conspriacry theory. If any single person can demonstrate documented proof of an ecternal link geting their site banned, by all means let me know so I can start a linking campaign to elimiate my competitors.
Maybe the title should be:
"Is Google Losing Market Share?"
I think THAT is the argument that makes the most sense. There is simply no denying that as the "spaminators" continue to pump out their million-page, datafeed generated, affiliate sites (which google seems to love), Google serp quality is sinking. I say this as a online retailer who get's roughly 35% of my traffic from google (mostly lately via adwords).
Personally, since our site is a strong converter and we utilize ppc campaigns well..I could care less who "wins" the search engine battle. I have seen (based on our 90 day stats) a movement (amounting to about a 15% shift of our overal organic traffic) away from google to Yahoo/MSN. Further, since over serp quality is way down, I do think searchers are becoming frustrated having to sift through the results to find the site(s) they want, and are turning either to adwords, or other engines.
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webfusion, google lost lost 50% of it's share on August 1st comapred to July 30th?
If Google is losing market share (which I have seen no evidence of) then it is not likely to be overnight.
As for losing market share overnight, tell that to netscape, who went from a wallstreet favorite and one of the leading market shares, to no longer even being a company and at the bottom of the market in less than 2 months.
This game changes fast and according to my stats and others, some of us are seeing this starting to happen. Trust me, I would prefer if it didn't, on every other search engine the serps are filled with competitors that have pretty good offerings of content, information and products. on Google, I am one of the only relevant sites left for my keyphrases.
added - the authority sites Im watching are not my own, although one of mine is involved, but this is not limited to one group or ring of sites.
As for losing market share overnight, tell that to netscape, who went from a wallstreet favorite and one of the leading market shares, to no longer even being a company and at the bottom of the market in less than 2 months.
And what does that have to do with customers using a search engine that is deep in cash?
You just said yourself that google had their slowest *growth* quarter ever. I'll tell you a little secret, gaining even slightly, is not losing.
It even took AV a lot longer than overnight to lose 30% market share, and they were in nowhere near as good of shape as Google, and they were not returning as good of results as Google is currently returning.
Can and will Google lose market share? Maybe. Are they losing it now? Maybe. Have they lost 30% in a short time frame? Absolutely not.
You are looking in the wrong place to explain a sudden drop.
I've actually dropped a few spots on almost half of my top 40 keyphrases, but my traffic from Google is up. Both numerically and percentage of all traffic and of SE traffic. My boost in traffic for the last two days is almost all from google.
Does my traffic being up mean that Google is gaining market share? No more than you losing traffic means that Google is losing market share.
The change has still not propagated to all of the data centers, so I'm pretty sure that the full effect has not shown up yet and lastly I believe that there is a big difference dependant on where (speaking geolocation) you get your traffic from.
That may well be so, but the original post to this thread was a day and a half ago - usually long enough for most, if not all data centers to update.
If, as you suggest, the serps have changed substantially in certain geo locations - I'd also expect members of WW, from those same locations, to be posting much about the new update (the silence is deafening).
I too saw a HUGE drop and by HUGE I mean thousands upon thousands of visitors lost per day if you add all my sites together.
One of my sites kept it keywords for well over a year and had about 4,000+ a day, now about 1,500. That is the lucky site.
Other sites had very high rankings on 1st page of many keywords and some have gone from 1300 per day to 100 and others as low as 32 people a day.
All our sites went by google rules, had the topics and some content, and had a page rank of 5.
We just don't understand why everything just dropped instantly.
One day I am making close to $1,000 per day, the next $20 if lucky.
What the heck is going on?
"I sort of bristle at posts suggesting that anyone who sees their G referrals fall somehow isn't following the rules, or building well-rounded sites"
Sorry if I gave the impression of being critical; not knowing the sites in question, I was speaking generally. After all, this forum is geared toward SEO, and I'd guess that a high percentage of the members are tweaking their sites to meet specific objectives, which is inherently riskier than sticking with an "organic" approach. It's a bit like the difference between being a day trader and an investor in an indexed stock fund. Some people have the nerve for the former; I'm not one of them. :-)
Chances are good that some people seeing a significant drop in referals but thinking their ranking hasn't changed may in fact be changed on one or more datacenters (the one where I am #102 is the one on www now for me).
There is all sorts of movement on the datacenters.
Also, and maybe I'm the only one who ever pays attention to this and tries to find significance in it... today the results for "keyword ~keyword" (no quotes) and "keyword keyword" searches changed significantly, for example, with different pages on my domain showing up as my two "representative" pages.
Another option is hosting problems but I checked and mine seemed OK during the week.
A third option is general networking problems on the internet [doubtful but possible].
Seasonality plays a part but not to this degree, perhaps it is a number of things combined to add up to this major drop.
Also I wanted to say it is possible Google is having major problems we don't know about [some have mentioned the possibility of them having hit a limit to the pages they can handle], maybe they have had to go back in time and use older data, something similiar to this.
Hopefully we will see a rebound next week, I expect this weekend to be dreadful but maybe we luck out and this is only a blip. Let's hope so!
However, it does not help knowing that your sales and adsense revenue have just dropped off the face of the earth.
I checked my main keywords and they have gone from page 1 to somewhere so deep in the google SERPS I got tired trying to find it.
I just hope that things do improve next week or I will have a lot of digging to do.
DONT PANIC
Definitely not... this is an interesting but very strange thread. I see no change in my SERPS and no change in traffic, admittedly in niches but it's hard to believe Google would suffer a sudden drop in usage other than what people have already suggested - like the Gulf Stream... seasonal etc.
just fyi, i happen to have a site that is large and broad-based and i do not get terribly obsessed with seo (if only because i have too many pages to even think that way). i engage in no link schemes or link swaps and while have paid for yahoo and a couple of other minor directories, most of my links are simply from the usefulness of my authoritative content.
yet i have faced a drastic decline this past week (on top of a very substantial drop at the beginning of june, which i originally attributed to the summer doldrums).
so while i applaud your spirit of trying to make the web safe for sites like ours which have genuinely useful content, as opposed to the relentless spammers and neer-do-wells who are only interested in profit and not users, my guess is that the recent changes have little to do with that.
Large sites seem to be the bigger victims then smaller sites based on my observations.
Here is an interesting tidbit though... One site received much of its traffic based on an extremely broad range of keywords that covered a lot of different combinations. It seems that the traffic for those thousands of combos went down dramatically while the traffic for a few of the targeted keyword phrases/pages (external links pointing to those pages) have retained their rankings.
What does that mean? From what I'm seeing, internal links/pages have lost much of their effectiveness while any page that had an external link pointing to it, have retained their effectiveness. Take it for what it is worth as that is one theory that maybe others can deny/confirm.
Interesting tidbit. I can see from some of my sites that have a lot of internal PR distribution losing ground. So the theory of discounting internal links may have merit. Thanks for sharing that info.
OR WE CAN ONLY MAKE NEW SITES WITH NEW PAGES.
THOUGH A LOT OF LABOUR WAS PUT INTO THIS SITE, AND IT WAS DOING GREAT FOR LAST TWO YEARS, BUT IF ITS OFF FROM GOOGLE, I THINK I SHOULD PLAN A NEW HOME FOR MY ARTICLES.
