Forum Moderators: Robert Charlton & goodroi
No rhyme or reason is evident from this seat, but the data by and large seems dated for whatever it is worth.
I see even improvements at some search positions, but the low traffic continues.
I'm not aware of any big changes going out on the 30th.
Could it be one of those Data Refreshes or a Data Push?
Thanks!
I can see slight movements (useless to say: stady to downwards directions only: nothing upwards) in my SERPS.
I'm sure that was a not-so-big change but definetly a change started in that moment as I checked our rankings right before it happened the change.
It looks like that the changes are now generally applied (took until yesterday night to see the new SERPS on 90-95% of all datacenters).
Definetly something "important but not trivial" happened sunday afternoon US time... :-)
Anyone else seeing anything like this?
Normally we get around 120K visits per day during the week, this is now around 160-180K per day. Visible PR updated, for me anyway, just about this time.
However, it might be slightly lower as we did automate some of our news at the same time, so we now publish it before peers...so a bit of both I think.
James
Back To Watching,
WW_Watcher
I'm still waiting to hear whether his site is still suffering from a local filter... from his location the site is always 2 to 3 places lower than on any directly accessed datacenter... there is another thread running about this that I read up on extensively last week so I know we are not alone in our experience.
Most curious is that the ratio of our paid Google to organic Google has dropped. With our rankings in place, we usually have a ratio of around 1:4+ (Google Paid:Google Organic). Right now, the ratio is around 1:2.5. We have added no new paid google listings, so that account is stable.
We are a bit of a moving target, we are constantly adding lots of pages to our site, but all site issues are resolved and steady. Just new content coming in every day. Plus keep in mind: our rankings are steady and awesome. Our is an authority site, thousands of #1 rankings, thousands of double indented listings, been around since the 90s, hundreds of thousands of pages across many different sectors. We are crawled every day, and it takes about 1-2 days for new pages to show up in the index. Indeed, with all the new content we are adding, one would surmise that our organic traffic would be growing.
If it is a simple reduction in overall traffic, October is slow, MLB finals, etc. etc., well, then lower waters would lower all boats... As it is, organic google is the only item that is down. Froogle is up, paid google is steady if not up a touch, and all the other cast members are up: Yahoo, MSN, etc.
So, one has to assume there are some changes of some sort in organic google.
rankings seem the same but traffic a quarter down. could it be the end of half term in the uk......?
Favor.
then it all went away a few days later. Now checking the different data centers I get some DC's with over 2000 pages indexed and some with 400-500 pages indexed. traffic down 2/3 since then.
Sunday I also saw 3000 more pages indexed. Today they are gone.
Most curious is that the ratio of our paid Google to organic Google has dropped. With our rankings in place, we usually have a ratio of around 1:4+ (Google Paid:Google Organic). Right now, the ratio is around 1:2.5. We have added no new paid google listings, so that account is stable.
Looks like Google is getting more adept and refined in their tactics for throwing dampers and filters on the organic side..(per your data)..thus pushing more revenue their way...(per the ratio shift)!
We are a bit of a moving target, we are constantly adding lots of pages to our site, but all site issues are resolved and steady. Just new content coming in every day. Plus keep in mind: our rankings are steady and awesome. Our is an authority site, thousands of #1 rankings, thousands of double indented listings, been around since the 90s, hundreds of thousands of pages across many different sectors. We are crawled every day, and it takes about 1-2 days for new pages to show up in the index. Indeed, with all the new content we are adding, one would surmise that our organic traffic would be growing.
I would venture to say that a suppression filter is in place for your new content...(given the track record you have and historical "DNA" data Google has regarding your site..) .. it would be a no brainer for them to trigger a filter for your site...and since you're running PPC as well...they have a treasure trove of data to draw from for your site "specifically" and your sector (since you do so well on the organic side)...
I don't see anything different today but that doesn't mean it isn't happening.
However we have also noticed a drop in organic traffic, despite our steady rankings.
helpnow, have you seen this thread? It sounds like you are seeing something similar.
Ranks Remain Stable - Google Traffic Halved [webmasterworld.com]
I am not a big one for conspiracy theories about manipulating organic SERPs to push businesses into using Adwords. In addition to Google's public denials of such a thing, it seems to me that it would be suicidal in the not-too-long run. But I do think something is going on here that warrants deeper investigation, both for you and simonmc who began the other thread. That kind of pattern is just not making sense so far.
Site #1 - August 6, 2006
Site #2 - October 23, 2006
Both of these normally show caches less than a week old. That 8/6/06 one really throws me for a loop. Almost 3 months old!
The other thing that I am seeing is that the number of results reported for search terms on these sites is significantly less than a week ago. One term shows 339,000 results, where a week or two ago there were closer to 2 million!
WBF
