Is Google controlling how many visitors it will send to your site?

very similar number of referrals from google from day to day?!

[brakkar]

Hi,
most of my traffic comes from google, and I noticed that from a day to another day, google sends almost the same amount of visitors. Example; yesterday traffic was 1559. Today is 1541. Much lower on the week end, but each week end is similar.

I find it curious as if google had a predetermined average traffic to allow to my site. Doesn’t look “random”.

I also noticed that my traffic increases during September and January months. These months, I experience excessive surge in traffic on some days. After these months, traffic stabilizes again, but higher on average than the previous stable months, as if a new plateau was allowed for my site after these specific months. Once this new plateau is set, google will keep sending almost same traffic each day for the other months until the new "plateau" months.

Has anyone noticed similar behaviour?

Cordially,
Brakkar

[Stefan]

You might just be seeing true, unfiltered, un-metred traffic. Sites have a natural ebb and flow of traffic, determined by demographics as much as anything else. My site does best through the week, less well on weekends, but overall better when the weather is poor in the northern hemisphere. Your site has it's own natural rhythim. Most of your traffic is from G, so you see a regular subset of searchers access your site at certain times, and it shows a predictable result in your log files.

I'm just guessing, of course, but imho you're probably just seeing demographics in action.

[europeforvisitors]

I see the same pattern with Yahoo and MSN referrals, too. I used to see the same pattern in the days of Infoseek and Hotbot. I guess it all comes down to statistics. (That's how airlines and hotel chains practice "yield management," and it's how Wal-Mart knows when to have another pallet of widgets delivered to the Pig's Knuckle, Arkansas store.)

[texasville]

In January my site's hits have more than doubled. I receive a small amount o traffic from google but msn and yahoo have exploded. I, too think it is demographics.

[Vadim]

It is all about statistics.

The deviations are natural fluctuations when they are roughly of the order of square root of N. In your case N = 1559, and sqrt(N) = 40, 1559 – 1541 = 20, so nothing to worry about, I believe.

Vadim.

[MHes]

Although it may not be the case here, some stats packages are very primitive and real traffic figures underread as your site gets busier. The possible reasons are:

1) Isp caching. They are getting very good at this, so during the day people are calling your site from the isp cache and not making a call on your server. This could mean that after most of the big isp's cache your page, you just won't know who and how many people are viewing the page.

2) The stats package resolves visitors to only the first few digits of an ip address. Thus, a server which 10 visitors have logged onto and then visited your site, resolves to only one 'unique' visitor as far as the stats software is concerned. This can really screw your data.

Both the above could create a dampening of your visitor count, as the day progresses.

[idolw]

isnt it based on the number of people searching?
that theory sounds more paranoic to me than my own paranoia about google analytics :)

[jenkers]

hi,
could it also be your hosting service? My traffic was very static for a long time - I'd been with the same hosting service for years - I don't generally look at my site too much but I started to do so much more around Nov-December time. It wasn't that frequent but I noticed timeouts and hanging browser issues etc. Anyway - over Christmas I shifted my website to a brand new hosting service with top of the range servers - lower number of customers etc - hey presto my stats (and earnings) are up over 30% straight away and rising. Might not be the case with you but it appears that my host was seriously holding me back.

[Visit Thailand]

if this was the case none of us would be affected by algo changes, spikes, etc.

As some have mentioned it could be your stats package.

I have seen problems with numerous stats packages.

But to presume G limits a sites VA's does not make sense.

[sailorjwd]

I've been amazed at the consistency of traffic since I started the site in 2000.

From day to day people are looking for the same programming examples - I would have thought most folks would have learned what I'm teaching by now :)

[RS_200_gto]

We added 500 new pages to our site throughout the year, but traffic is still the same very little changes it seams that the search engines control the amount of traffic we receive every week or month plus or minus 50 searches to our site.

I like to know if the search engines have that much control over our search traffic?

[tedster]

I often see the kind of consistency in search engine traffic that you are describing -- but it's important not to form a conclusion about cause-and-effect when all we can see for sure is some kind of correlation. (By the way, for a great read on this topic, check out the book Freakonomics.)

While there are many sources of traffic, search engines are certainly a big one. But why would they artifically control traffic on a per-domain basis? That wouldn't fit into their mission or business purpose, from the way I see it, and I really doubt that they would put any resources in that kind of direction. The leveling-off phenomenon we can see is probably more controlled by a steady and finite amount of interest in our particular topics.

[jomaxx]

First of all, Google doesn't normally track outbound clicks so they don't even know how many visitors they are sending you.

Second, say you rank in the top 10 for a given term; how are Google going to put a cap on your traffic? Prevent people from making that search? Drop you from the search results towards the end of the day if you have taken more than your share of traffic? This effect has, to the best of my knowledge, never been reported.

[bobmark]

"From day to day people are looking for the same programming examples - I would have thought most folks would have learned what I'm teaching by now :)"

Hey, sailoer, maybe your examples are not very well written so people have to keep coming back to understand them :)

Would seem clear Google could not limit referrals and there also seem to be "natural levels." For example, with a medium sized, single topic site without massive ad campaigns or questionable techniques it has always seemed hard to break the barrier of around 1,000 uniques per day from Google. I've had several sites build steadily to around that threshhold and then stall.