HUGE Google traffic surge (August 30th)

[victorP]

Hello,

I have just been reviewing my stats and noticed two different sites with massive gains in organic traffic. Has anybody else noticed this today(Aug 30th)?

The second site is rather new, and had just been moved over to a new server.

The first site has regained a good chumk of the traffic that it first lost at the end of November 2006.

The google gods just seem to come and go as they please.

Anyone else notice anything?

[narsticle]

have not noticed this. are you now ranking high for a high traffic keyword that you werent before?

[Drew_Black]

I have seen huge increases as well. We went from 3.5k - 4k Google organic referrals across 2500 - 3500 keyword combos to 18k - 21k /day over 14.5k - 18k keywords. It's still growing too.

We haven't made any changes.

[lakr]

I noticed the same, though my traffic does not increase significantly like yours, but Google seems to grant me some more trustrank, many of my pages now get out of supplemental index and the others rank much higher in comparison to last month.

Thank Google for trusting my site, keep updated and get TrustRank.

Best wishes to all.

Lkr

[RichTC]

i dont see this in the UK

It looked to me like a new set of serps Thursday with changes, some sites up some down and by late Friday/Sat it had rolled back.

The serps now look like the old serps of a few weeks back - so i cant see how this is an update?

unless you are seeing something im not?

[taps]

I can see more traffic too - about 5-7 percent. My site is ranking better than before on some single keywords.

Although this is great, I don't believe that it will last long. I've seen gains like these a few times before. After a week traffic always went back to normal again.

[Drew_Black]

I'm not expecting it to last either. The extra traffic is nice but it's not quality traffic.

[RichTC]

could be testing different things? Who knows?

Still looks like some kind of roll back to me as the serps changed on Thursday with some sites moving up and some out of the index and currently it looks the same as it was before but time will tell?.

You wonder if they rolled out improved serps on Thursday and found that because they were more on target perhaps adwords income went down so they reversed it?.

Are you seeing increases on long tail or short searches?

Also, isnt a green bar update due soon?

[rashe18]

The same thing.

before 2 days: 2500 unique visitor

yesterday : 2800 unique visitor

[rashe18]

sorry , not 2800 , i mean 3800

[Tonearm]

RichTC,

I bet AdWords income is at the root of all the chaos lately.

[Drew_Black]

Just an update. The google-related traffic continues to rise.

Aug 29th: 3900 google organic referrals
30th: 19,500
31st: 22,700
1st: 22,600
2nd: 23,000
3rd: 26,762
4th: 28,900

We're on a run rate today to break 30k. I'm not complaining but it's mostly low-quality traffic. Our pages/visit average has dropped from 7.16 on the 29th of August to 2.25 yesterday. (though the bounce rate has improved so who knows, maybe it's "more efficient" traffic?)

[Halfdeck]

I've been hearing stories about huge traffic spikes (in one case, a site owner's Google traffic jumped from 18k to 80+k) but I haven't heard any conclusive theories about why its happening.

[tedster]

I also would love some detail - a spike in the raw traffic numbers just doesn't say enough. For example, did the new traffic go to a wider assortment of landing pages? For the traffic that went to the same old pages, was it based on more search terms ranking well, or greater volume on the same keywords? Etc.

Problem is, many people don't analyze their data down to this level - never understood why not, I must say.

[Drew_Black]

Our increase has been across many, many new landing pages. (thousands of them.)

According to G Analytics, As of noon PDT today we're at 18,038 google organic referrals across 14,500 search terms to 8,479 landing pages. On Aug 29th we had 3,813 visits across 3,064 different search terms to 2,159 landing pages.

[Halfdeck]

You guys know if any of the traffic is coming from pages that used to be labeled supplemental results? Google did say something about sending more traffic to supplemental pages by the end of the summer.

[Drew_Black]

I never really paid much attention to supplemental/non-supplemental in the past.

[dataguy]

We've received a signifigant surge in traffic in the past few days a well (31% overall). We hadn't payed much attention to supplemental listings either, but this is on a rather large site which would likely have a lot of so-called long-tail phrases.

I'm wondering if there has been a change in the supplemental listings so web sites with lots of pages which might have been supplimental before are now receiving traffic.

My site has about 50,000 pages, how about yours?

[Drew_Black]

500k pages to my site.

yesterday's google organic referrals:
36300 visits from 27204 keywords to 13147 landing pages.

[SEOPTI]

It's easy, traffic levels are directly related to supplemental pages. More supplementals, less traffic.

[Drew_Black]

All good things must come to an (expected) end.

Yesterday's Google referrals:
43,000 visits across 32,300 keywords to 15,394 landing pages.

As of 2:00 am last night it looks like things have dropped back to their August 27th levels which isn't such a bad thing.

[dataguy]

Yep, at 2 AM this morning things went back to normal. That's ok I'm fine with normal.

Last year on Sept. 15th we lost 90% of our traffic for 7 months and I'm still twitching involuntarily.

[Drew_Black]

BTW, not sure if it's related but the 2am drop in traffic coincided with an error in processing our sitemap files. (Our sitemaps have been fine for over a year with no problems.) The error appears to be on Google's side. It reads: "We experienced a temporary error processing your Sitemap. Please try again later. To help us prevent these errors in the future, please post your Sitemap URL and the date and time of the error to our discussion forum. "

[kcguitar]

I have experienced three separate surges in traffic in 2007. All were related to supplemental results where Google slowly lets pages out of supps, then slowly draws them back in over about a 10 day period. From May 14th - 24th my traffic (and Adsense revenue) more than doubled, then went back to previous levels. Now I am experiencing a smaller increase since Sept. 3rd.

[dataguy]

No error in site maps here, I just checked...

[rashe18]

Also my site , back to normal.

[taps]

same here - back to normal which is not too bad

[Drew_Black]

BTW, our Google traffic has dropped to about 80% of what we were seeing around Aug 27th.

[wellzy]

Huge surge from Sept 9th-Sep 11th here. Back to my sad, normal referrals now.

[freelistfool]

My site traffic doubled (increasing a bit every day) from 9/2 to 9/5.
Fell back to normal (decreasing a bit each day) from 9/6 to 9/8.
Doubled again (increasing a bit each day) from 9/7 to 9/11.
Fell back to normal (decreasing a bit each day) from 9/12 to 9/15.
Went up 42% from 9/15 to 9/16. So it looks like the upswing is on it's way again.

The new traffic is from long tail keywords from a variety of pages.