Traffic from G

is it tightly controlled?

[shadeofgray]

Some day I was studying my logs and trying to estimate volume of my traffic sources. And I've noticed very strange digits:

DAY Traffic from Google 
N 110 (exactly) 
N+1 100 (exactly) 
N+2 100 (exactly) 
N+3 90 (exactly) 

Coincidence? I think it is improbable. Looks like Google is controlling the volume of traffic I recieve and excludes my site from SERPs when my quota is exhausted. May be some one can give another explanation? What do you think about it?

[piatkow]

I doubt it but try looking at the spread of hits across the day.

Identify your popular search arguements and test them after 50 and 100 hits to see if the results differ.

[europeforvisitors]

I used to see the same pattern when my big referrers were search engines like InfoSeek, AltaVista, and Ask Jeeves. It's the same statistical principle that lets airlines, hotels, and cruise lines manage their inventory. For that matter, I know a guy with a small retail store who has what (to a layman) seems like an uncanny knack for predicting sales on any given day of the year.

[mahoogle]

In the past, we've seen traffic increases from Google that seem to resemble a step function. Although, it happens in ten day chunks or so for us.

When we make changes to the site, the pattern is disrupted, but tends to come back after stabilizing.

We've had a theory that google throttles the amount of traffic that a domain gets and imposes limits on growth. To this end, we'll be testing a few changes to see if it's true or not.

[Tonearm]

I'm seeing the same type of thing with my site, but within single days.

[jomaxx]

If you're talking about the fact that all those numbers end in zero, of course it's coincidence. Web traffic isn't like a faucet anyone can turn on and off. It all depends on who happens to be searching for what.

Even if they were trying to send nice round numbers of visitors to your site every day, it wouldn't be visible to you unless your server's daily logs were synced to theirs.

[znakedwrx]

I have the same problem. I can basicly guess the amount of traffic that i would get in one day without a problem. Yahoo i cannot predict today is 100 tomorrow 200 etc.., however for google in my case the number is "120 to 129" and over the weekends its "50-59" and it goes for last ~8 months. Why? - I dont know.