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Anyone else seeing an abnormally large January spike in search traffic?
I have done lots of different SEO tweaks so this is the obvious result. What I did find odd was how they first dropped to get better.
That's my experience.
KG
Yes, Y! and MSN are way up.
Also a spike in sales, for us and (it appears) our competitors.
Google Traffic is higher than it was, and yahoo and msn traffic are on the fast rise.
Anyone also tracking bots? They've been attacking my sites multiple times a day! which is more than average for some simple sites and most sites that aren't a PR8+
KG
The additional Y! traffic I can't correlate to anything, unless it's a rub-off effect of people trying MSN and deciding to see what else is out there?
Has the war started?
TJ
January shows a bump of 15-20% in total visits. The largest portion of this came from Google, including a growing list of regional Googles. Both MSN and Yahoo referrals have grown from almost none, to a steady 5-10% of total referrals in January. Additionally, referrals from authority sites seems to have risen across the board. I suspect that they are getting the "spike" too and passing on some their own increase in traffic.
Ok, if it wasn't due to my SEO, what caused the significant bump in January Google referrals? My position in the SERPs has not changed significantly, nor are there any new keywords that stand out in my stats reports.
On the big sites, the big gains were Google and Google Images. Y! and the new MSN both seem to have reduced how deep they are crawling, so they are only sending traffic to between 2% and 4% of my pages. Heck, for February Google images has given me twice the traffic as MSN and is just about to catch up with Y!.
On the small sites of only a couple hundred pages, Y! and MSN increased on par with Google traffic.
The strange thing is that I would swear that my positions have dropped for most of the keywords that I have checked. Granted, I don't check all of the 25k and 62k keyphrases that the 2 big sites draw from each month. I check about a dozen each site, and most of those were at the same point or lower.
Though there was one where there was an obvious advantage in that a site dropped from #8 and #14 to an indented #11 and #12 which is better than being below the fold on page 1.
I have no idea of why it happens... in previous years no-one was ever able (or willing) to take a guess at it.
The site is in the travel/destination guide sector.
