Forum Moderators: Robert Charlton & goodroi
I've a site that I started a little more than 6 months ago. About 50 pages at this point, all of which I've written myself.
I've been featured on a couple "high volume" social networking type sites a couple times which has led to about 900 backlinks as reported by Yahoo. I've done no link buying or asking for links.
I am up to about 500 visits a day on average, with 3.75 pages per visit avg. (2k daily page view give or take) I think that's respectable given the industry and age of the site. I also think the 3.75 pages per visit avg validates that I'm creating quality content.
I'm quite surprised to see that at this point, Google accounts for less than 35% of my incoming traffic. Given my previous Google experience, I would have expected much higher.
Here's are my top 6 referrals:
1. Google - 34.82% <---- Puzzled by this
2. <Industry Site> - 21.17%
3. Direct - 13.83%
4. <social networking site> - 5.99%
5. <another social networking site> - 3.55%
6. <"other"> - 20.63% <---- I am shocked by this
This is my first "quality content" site that has gotten traction. 2002-2004 I ran some successful affiliate type sites which are now dead, and have a small content site that's never really taken off. On those sites, Google's always been well over the 50% mark in terms of referrals.
With this new site, I guess that means one of two things:
1. My links are performing much better than I would have expected.
2. Given the quality of the site as validated by link traffic and pages per visit, Google is much slower that I expected to recognize the quality of the site and send traffic my direction.
I'm taking stock and trying to figure out what all this means and what the actual potential of this site is. (Is this site capable of 10X growth from where it is now? 20X? Revenue potential over the next couple of years is in the front of my mind in terms of how much effort I put into it.
The idea of starting another content site is also on my mind, but know I won't be able to continue to give the above site as much attention if I go that route.
Not sure exactly what I'm asking for, but decided I should write something more than normal for the #300, and this came out. I guess if I had to put this in the form of a question or discussion starter...
1. What's the potential of this situation?
2. Will Google traffic pick up based on things already in place? (It's just a little slow, but will come around...?)
3. Should I keep going full steam ahead on this, or is now a good time to start another site?
4. Generally how am I doing, and is there anything I should be doing differently?
5. Have questions for me? I consider this a success story that may help motivate others.
As for having specific sites that send you so much traffic, I would take that as a sign that you have a lot of room to grow when it comes to search engine traffic.
My take on this is if google isn't about 80% of your referring traffic, your site is still in the sandbox *duck*.
My take is that if you don't have at least 50% of your traffic from non-search engine sources, you have bigger problems than the sandbox.
