Huge spike Google and related traffic Tuesday

[adamxcl]

I've never seen this before but I got a HUGE spike in traffic from Google, Yahoo, and AOL for around two hours (12-2pm EST). This lead to a 30% record traffic day overall, but those two hours were dramatic. Normally I get about 800 referrals from Google a day but I got about 400 during this time period alone. Same increase for Yahoo and AOL, and then it goes back to normal the rest of the day and today.

Are there such temporary shifts in rankings that would cause this? I've never seen this before in two years of Google traffic.

Of course afterward, I can't see anything obvious that would have caused it.

[IanTurner]

I have seen similar blips from Fresh results but they usually last around 3 days.

[yankee]

Perhaps your listings three months ago were really good? See this other thread:

"Google currently has one Database that is three months old!"

[beach]

When I optimised my site for google, it went from 900 googles a week to 1800 the week, after it got indexed.

One week later it was down to 1100 googles.

14 weeks later we are creeping back up to 1800 regular googlers.

[shelleycat]

Maybe something weird happened in your target market?

I've had spikes in hits on an old page of mine when a well known website went down. I made the mistake of putting that websites name in my yahoo listing so my page comes up in the top ten for a yahoo search on their site name. Every time the big site goes down I get 100 people an hour plus hitting my page from that yahoo listing (this is about two days worth of traffic to that page). I guess they're all hoping I can tell them what's wrong or something.

I know my example is way scaled down but there is a small possibilty there is something external driving your peak.

[Harley_m]

I dont know how competitive your market is, but could it have been that one of your major competitors' site went down...so everyone who would go there spilt outwards toward you...?