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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
Its sad but i think i will make another site with same content. cause i can't live for long without google traffic
1. STOP PANICING: A change after only a few days may or may not stick.
2. START DIVERSIFYING: If the only way for you to earn a living is by relying on free search engine traffic, time to start diversifying away from that traffic source. For example: Two years ago, after growing tired of the roller coaster in earnings that relying of free traffic brings, I started a focused effort on developing both my site and my PPC campaign to the point that I can make a great profit no matter where my site falls in the free serps. At this point, I make $6.80 for every $1.00 I spend on PPC.
Further, I began focuing on strengthening my linking campaign so that each and every link trade was only to sites that would both bring me visitors that would actually be interested in my products, AND that my users would be interested in as well (read: on topic sites with similar themes). To date, traffic from those incoming links alone is responsible for 20% of my sales - again, regardless of where I fall in the free serps.
3. REPEAT 3 TIMES:
- I WILL NOT RELY ON FREE TRAFFIC TO PAY MY BILLS
- I WILL NOT RELY ON FREE TRAFFIC TO PAY MY BILLS
- I WILL NOT RELY ON FREE TRAFFIC TO PAY MY BILLS
By relying on free traffic as your sole source of income, not only have you completely turned your finacial well-being over to an entity which you have no control over, you've placed YOURSELF in the postion of having to go back to "square one" each time a site is "dropped".
Do yourself a favor, and take this negative and turn it into a positive: Alter the way you do business and free yourself from the stress and headaches of constant worrying about what the engines are doing.
[edited by: WebFusion at 12:34 pm (utc) on Aug. 9, 2004]
A little patience may be in order.
Since your site is an established, old, clean, static, regularly updated high pr website, the only reasoning is that Google may have decided to break the statu quo by dropping "stale" results in favor of a newer index.
Rankings may now be divorced from the way Google traditionally presented them. High PR, enough themed backlinks, regular updates, regular ORGANIC link acquisition and all that we have learned, may not necessarily yield top positions from now on.
I make no claims for relevence here but I have no ads, PPC etc. All pages are basic HTML with good solid relevant content.
One thing I have noticed recently is the lowering in serps of the sites that are designed basically to lead to Amazon (I'm in books so always battling with these sites).
I wonder if Google may be responding to claims that I hear from my customers who are using other engines now because
"All you ever get are irrelevant pages that just lead somewhere else"
I know a month ago when I used Google for a personal search (buying music based T shirt) I gave up, page after page of spammy and auto generated pages just full of ads - went to Yahoo - No Problemo!
Regards
Rod
Brett, care to share if WW's Google traffic has hung in there? Anyone else have a big, multi-themed site whose Google traffic has not slipped?
maybe tiny, tiny tweaks or data moving back and forth between DCs till it's settled. I predict that within a week we'll see a major backpedaling on this. Even non SEOd, years old sites have hit hard.
But i think i have worked a lot for that traffic and created lot many articles.
you may say it google traffic, but i want my share back.
Where can I sign up for this program where I donate some of my work to Google and in return they give me guaranteed traffic? I don't remember seeing that option anywhere.
Read WebFusion's post above, then go read it again several times.
99.9% of the sites out there, especially in the ecomm sector, are easily replaced by 100 other sites that offer exactly the same things.
You had a good spot in the mall, but someone set up a similar store two doors closer to the parking lot.
You had a good spot in the mall, but someone set up a similar store two doors closer to the parking lot.
Depends on the quality of the new shop though doesn't it. The sites which have dropped were of a higher standard than what's taken it's place. At least in my area.
I know a month ago when I used Google for a personal search (buying music based T shirt) I gave up, page after page of spammy and auto generated pages just full of ads - went to Yahoo - No Problemo!
I just searched on Yahoo for one of the world's most popular female artists t-shirts. Top result was a poster site using all posters affiliate scheme. So doh
Depends on the quality of the new shop though doesn't it.
No, it doesn't. If that shop that is closer to the parking lot is a worse shop than yours, you do not have a *right* to be moved closer to the parking lot at the mall owner's expense, and you cannot expect that all the customers should still walk past that store to find yours.
You need to do something to get them to find your shop. Your traffic is your responsibility.
Search query before:
1.) 100000+
2.) 100000+
3.) 100000+
4.) 100000+
5.) 100000+
6.) 50000+
7.) 100000+
8.) 100000+
9.) 1000+
10.) 100000+
Search query now:
1.) 100000+
2.) 100000+
3.) 10000+
4.) 5000+
5.) 5000+
6.) 5000+
7.) 50000+
8.) 100000+
9.) 5000+
10.) 5000+
I'm not as sad that some of this really big (in my area Chinese) money machines with a lot of errors and no real interest other have gone. IMHO Google really had a case here.
But also a lot of really good very big sites have been penalized and the results are really not the best at this moment! So I see at least some fine tuning needed on the new Google...
You need to do something to get them to find your shop. Your traffic is your responsibility.
yeah but the point of a search engine is find the best shop. Not the closest. I am afraid your analogy doesn't really make sense. The job of a search engine (Google) is to find the best result or so they say. A shopping mall where you walk around is about paying the mall owners the most money (ppc).
So it is Google's responsibility to provide traffic to the best shop/website or it goes out of business. And if they stick to this update they will. Because no webmasters will design websites with Google in mind, which is the death of any SE.
I see big 100000+ sites often with problems or no interest in quality
Yeah some do, but there are plenty of big sites with good content which have been hit. Such as product review sites.
[edited by: mikeD at 5:45 pm (utc) on Aug. 9, 2004]
You just need to build that organic site so that it *deserves* the top rankings, and raise its authority-like score, and you can achieve incredible stability.
Well, try in this concept for size. If a site is really well rounded, it will do reasonably well no matter how Google adjusts the settings on the algo. The sites have not been optimized for the current algo settings, they have been optimized for all the possible algo settings.
Your aura of invincibility is naive. You should have a look at the site in danny's profile. Like the site in your profile, danny's site is a great site. I know you would like to think Google is a great sytstem which always rewards good content but that is not the case. For every spammy page in Google, some great content got burried. In my opinion, great content is hard to come by for many Google searches.
Good sites, great sites do get hurt and are not always rewarded. Please save the preaching, you are not the only one who knows what good content is. Just be thankful your site is flourishing. Great sites may *deserve* top rankings but don't get too comfortable in the notion that they are necessarily going to get them.
It seems that "older" URL's have gained some traction, while newer content has suffered?
A lot of my deep pages are showing dates of April & march in their cache. Remember when they did a similar thing about this time last year?
1) Index was rolled back 2-3 months.
2) New content was removed from the index.
3) The next "update" showed a ton of new content. Back then they were doing monthly updates, and I seem to remember this particular update taking a long time (1-2 months?).
Your aura of invincibility is naive. You should have a look at the site in danny's profile
This is the truth. BigDave, why not take a look instead of spewing that nonsense over and over again? Sure, no good sites ever have any instability at all. His site smokes your hobby site, to be frank, and he has lost traffic, no? There are others in this thread that I happen to know have amazing sites that are suffering FWIW.
Please save the preaching, you are not the only one who knows what good content is
Please! Spare us all!
I am sure we could all have stable sites in the backpacking niche, some just compete in areas that are a bit more lucrative. In one area I follow, for the major terms, there has not been 1 site in the top 10 that was 6 months ago :)
Written Url- PageTopicHere.htm
Others- appdetail.php?id=283
Others- product.php/B000067R7X
May be something this simple they did, give less weighting to written urls.
I don't see this as having hit affiliate sites as many affiliate sites having the Others urls are at the top now.
Also pagerank, which google was built on, appears to have been abandoned by them.
People always make posts like these everytime an also changes happens, shaking things up a bit. Obviously good advice, but
I could also say
-DO NOT RELY ON PPC TO PAY YOUR BILLS' or
-DO NOT RELY ON OFFLINE ADVERTISING TO PAY YOUR BILLS'
__so what?_________________________
This forum seems to be aimed at people who have an interest in SEO'ing or improving their free serps, not other income streams which have other forus dedicated to them....