traffic from google has dropped

[dhaliwal]

anyone seen the drop in traffic from google?
I am seeing that the traffic has dropped nearly 50 % in a day while the pages in index are the same and also the SERP have not changed that way.

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

[diamondgrl]

since the beginning of june, our traffic has been off about 25-30%. yesterday, our traffic was off an additional 30% over the week before. like you, we get thousands of referrals a day from google and traffic is, as far as these things go, relatively predictable, so it was definitely an anomaly that made me sit up and notice.

we don't rely on any small set of keywords, so it's hard to guage whether we are appearing the same in the serps, but we certainly have about the same number of pages in the index as last week.

[dbenatar]

Starting yesterday we've seen a precipitous drop in natural traffic from Google. Our best ranking interior pages have fallen around 15 spots from top 3 positions. No change in page rank on these pages or our home page. We're down more than 50% from Wednesday.

[my3cents]

Wow, I tried to post this same topic a few days ago but it never saw the light of day. Yes G traffic is dropping without losing positioning, there is a reason for this and it may explain why Y! and MSN traffic is at a 3 year high for me.

the reason: the results are so poor that people are taking the 2 seconds to search somewhere else. I said over the last two months that most of my reputable competitors have disappeared from the results, at first I thought this would bring me a lot of new business from google. Solid companies that have ranked well for a long time lost their listings, in their place is a mix of off topic sites, affiliate pages for single products and adsense pages with only one or two paragraphs of generic text and google ads.

People are obviously not finding enough variety on google for our keyphrase so they either go to Yahoo or MSN. If you read some of the other threads and see what kind of ridiculous things google has in their index and it's no wonder.

My website spent the last two months at #1 with no real competition in the top ten for our top keyphrase but our google traffic is down.

With Y! and MSN gunning to "tackle google" along with some new search engines popping up, most notably Mark Cuban's new icerocket project, the days of google owning the search market are nearly over.

[div01]

My traffic from Google is down today, though I think there has been some movement in the SERPS.

[Marval]

There are some major shifts in the SERPs - more than the usual freshness type movement - but its only on a few of the datacenters - and Im only seeing it occasionally - but it looks like the overseas SERPs have changed considerably
The major change Im seeing looks almost like an algo change to drop the weighting given to authority sites - as those seem to be the major players affected

[sprinttotal]

My traffic from Google is up since July... Also, it's August, everyone's at the beach!

[walkman]

"My traffic from Google is up since July... Also, it's August, everyone's at the beach"
same boat regarding July (very happy of cuourse), hoping you're right about August since my traffic went down this week.
of course someone in the same field maybe got the increase as a result of our loses. Hard to tell

[andrew_m]

Actually, traffic drop is the reason I'm hanging around webmasterworld today -- to see if someone gives a clue of some sort.

I've lost almost 50% comparing to last week and weeks before without any changes on my part or any visible changes in serps. And that's across thousands of pages -- which excludes random fluxes, so there is definitelly some change that I'm yet to see..

[outland88]

My traffic is normally like the stock market. Normal fluctations do't do much. If its a big drop then people tighten those purse strings and watch the market until things get better.

[andrew_m]

Yeah, that's what I told myself on Tue, Web and Thu :)
It's across thousands of relevant, unique pages and the change is in thousands of daily visitors -- so I tend to believe there is some horse trading behind that stock market drop :)

[lorenzinho2]

Our Google traffic dropped 26% on August 4. It has not recovered - if anything dropping a little more today. This is across thousands of search terms and thousands of pages.

SEPRS positions seemed to have dropped slightly across the board.

Something went down on Wednesday... anyone have ideas?

[lorenzinho2]

< across thousands of search terms and thousands of pages.

this seems to be a recurring theme. Marval's theory that the knob is getting twisted away from authority sites is as good as any.

and yes it feels like our knob is getting twisted

[my3cents]

"Everyone's at the beach" - Good Idea! :)

I agree that there is some drop across the board in the summer but this does not explain why my MSN and Yahoo referrals have nearly doubled while G referrals have dropped about 50%

I don't think that the serps are as bad for every search, but in my market they are really bad, not sites positioned above mine since I am #1, it's the lack of other relevant websites showing in the top 10.

If I was one of my customers and wanted to shop around, which most people do, I would have no choice but to click adwords or go to another search engine to find some other relevant websites. Both MSN and Y are showing all completely relevant websites... like google used to do.

My stats are telling me that this is exactly what is happening.

In an article titled "How Yahoo Plans To Tackle Google" Yahoo's Director of Search said "When users engage in our search, we want to be the highest quality search engine on the web. We want to delight them and win them over."

I think if Google wants to keep their spot at the top they may want to consider showing some higher quality results. It doesn't matter to me where the traffic comes from, as long as it comes.

[ogletree]

It really depends on your site. We have a site that has had no changes but is way up becasue people are searching for it's subject more this time of year than ever. We have other sites that have dropped. I have sites that cover everything so I see ups and downs all the time. Overall my traffic is up.

[dhaliwal]

So its effecting a lot of people and not only me.

I have spent nearly 12 hours to check each and every keyword from a list of more than 5000 keywords on whom we get traffic from google and there has been no changes in SERP.

It seems to me like there is something wrong happening at google, or maybe there is some other network trouble that google isn't sending us the traffic as it used to be earlier.

But i have seen a drop for the whole month and yesterday was the worst ever figures, We are at the lowest traffic level of last 6 months.

Sounds to me that we should have traffic from some other sources also, or we may be in trouble with lower earnings.

[PhraSEOlogy]

I have noticed a big drop in visitors in the last 5 days. The really odd thing is adsense shows a reduction of impressions (about 50-60%) but the revenue has rebounded. Thefore, I can only conclude that I am getting paid 50-60% more per click.

Can anyone explain this anomaly?

[BigDave]

So its effecting a lot of people and not only me.

Not here. I got more traffic today than I did on Monday. Friday is traditionally my second worst day, and Monday is my best. I'm up almost 30% since last Friday.

I have spent nearly 12 hours to check each and every keyword from a list of more than 5000 keywords on whom we get traffic from google and there has been no changes in SERP.

Sorry, but I'm going to have to call you on that. I can't check my to 10 keyphrases from day to day without at least a couple wiggling around. There is absolutely no way that you can have 5000 that have seen "no change" unless all 5000 are solidly pegged at #1. And if you have 5000 at #1 then you must have about 250,000 that aren't that deliver a large part of your traffic that you haven't checked.

If you really want to know what is happening, you need to track each keyword from day to day.

<added>By the way, do you check who else is showing up in your most popular keyphrases? If you had garbage above you before, but a good site is now listed, that could account for a huge drop in traffic</added

[bhd735]

"With Y! and MSN gunning to "tackle google" along with some new search engines popping up, most notably Mark Cuban's new icerocket project, the days of google owning the search market are nearly over. "

My3cents,

Thanks for the heads up on icerocket. I havent heard of them before. I tried them out today and was surprised with how good the results are. Nice change from the google link farm results.

Relevant=Content.

[Nicke]

My traffic is up 30% the last few days, althought I am usually quite stable and have similar SERPS in both google.com and country specific Googles while neighbour SERPS is more varying. (My competitor is always #1 in google.com but #19 in country specific google since few days back)

Look like the websites who were affected by Florida is doing better now.

[rickbender1940]

Huge drops in SERPS almost across the board on the morning of Aug 6. Slight recovery by nighttime. But it quite a broad movement down.

Anybody else seeing this?

[my3cents]

bhd735,

If you like icerocket.com you should check out Mark Cuban's Web Blog "Watch Out Google….here we come!" [blogmaverick.com...]

[Dayo_UK]

Traffic has certainly dropped for some of my sites (one of my sites very dramatically(not to bothered about that one though)).

I think it is mainly due to changes in Serps combined with the Summer Hols really kicking in.

[dhaliwal]

BIGDAVE

You said it right that its not possible for one person to check 5000 keywords, but i have 5 ppl working here for me and we worked for around 12 hours and its not a big deal to check the SERP for those keywords on which we work day and night.

And it was done so fast cause we were really concerned about how the things have changed so fast, but there was not change in SERP for my industry.

I wish the things get good early.

Has anyone seen any news about the Low Network Traffic?

Regards
Dhaliwal

[dhaliwal]

Anyone, Who has seen huge rise in traffic this week?

I mean is there someone who has gained traffic as result of lot of people like me loosing traffic.

[percentages]

>Not here. I got more traffic today than I did on Monday. Friday is traditionally my second worst day, and Monday is my best. I'm up almost 30% since last Friday.

BigDave is correct, and I think he must be in the same market as me as we have identical traffic patterns!

Something has changed at Google. I have attempted to start a new thread on this subject, with some ideas for discussion....but it is currently in the holding queue!

While we wait update "Augustus" is certainly something to document :)

[Marval]

percentages - being pretty much limited to one genre of sites I can only speak for my industry, but I'm wondering if some of you can check the "authority" sites to see if they are still holding steady in the top results for your niches. Another thing I had noticed is that these changes are not spread across all datacenters so it might take some playing around to get a good view of it.
As far as the summer slowdown effect - Ive dealt with that every year for 5 years and know what to expect there - these traffic changes, which I can see in the SERPs when I see the right datacenter, are definitely caused by changes in positioning, which I can trace in quite a few cases to some sort of algo change.

[HarryM]

I suspect something has changed which has resulted in repositioning. But as usual there are so many variables that it is difficult to be certain. If it is a change in Google, the difference in the start of increases/decreases may be due to regionality.

In my own case last weekend's traffic was at its normal low, but rose steeply on Monday. Traffic during the week 2-6 June was 20%-30% higher, and it looks as if today's results will be better than previous Saturdays. But of course this may be a blip due to some other factor.

However there's always a downside! Although traffic has increased, AdSense revenue has dropped. Presumably (hopefully) due to a seasonal effect.

[mikeD]

Yep massive drop on all my sites, maybe 50% plus. Can't see the reason. This is not only my sites, but all the sites around me. Serps in my area are of a very poor standard, not being biased here. Because it's not just me but all the sites around me. Pretty irrelevant content top. Better go pray.

[cindysunc]

Haven't read the 3 pages because it's probably the same old stuff. But "traffic from google has dropped" Of course it has. Every day, week or month someone is going to see a traffic drop along with a lot of others. Every day, week or month someone is going to see steady traffic along with a lot of others. Every day, week or month someone is going to see a traffic increase along with a lot of others.