Is there a threshold for google traffic?

[Martin Ice Web]

I allways wonder, about the daily user quantity that are shifted to our page by google results. Its day in day out nearly the same. In regard of user search behaviour for searching miscellaneous widgets there should be more flow in the user quantity.
We monitor the querys very exactly. THis day we are good at green widget, next day at red widget. But the overall user amount stays the same.

Is there a threshold for every page, where google says, no more visitors for today - better to control the serps in a way, that this treshold will be reached but not crossed.

I know it sounds silly, but who knows what google processes in their algo?

[tedster]

There have been a number of posts here this year with a similar suspicion - some of the data that was posted looked very much as though there was some kind of automated throttle on traffic for some sites. It's just guesswork right now, but in some cases it does look "very interesting."

[edited by: tedster at 12:10 am (utc) on Oct. 18, 2008]

[Martin Ice Web]

Tedster,

thanx for replying. I Didnīt know about these threats.
So what iīm wondering about, is, that keywords change from day to day and still this threshold will be reached.
Although I look in google suggestions for keywords, google says take "xuy" for keyword this will be 200.000 search a month.
My page is first for "xuy" but the 200.000 is not even reached closly. What I figured out is, that if a keyword gets to run run very smooth on google search, the next day ( or even hours later ) it is gone.
What i am saying is, keyword1 runs very well - > the treshold seems to be reached very fast - then all of the sudden this keyword is lost in google serps - threshold will be reach very slowly now and will never be crossed. I see this behaviour on 3 pages in a very competitive area.

Is is some rotation for sales sites? Everyone should have a pice of the pie?

[internetheaven]

I've always thought it was very strange, never thought it was manually controlled.

"Everybody should get a piece of the pie" is not really the aim of natural search results and shouldn't be Google's aim either - I can't see the reason. Apple.com should always rank top for ipod/mac sales queries, not their retail partners (unless they've seo'd the hell out of some long tails). If I typed in 'ipod' and Apple was in fifth place under the fold I would think the search engine I was using was broken.

[Martin Ice Web]

Maybe we can combine it withe rollercoaster phenomen. Maybe google was adjusting some thresholds on pages and was (is) not able to controll the serps in a smooth way for reaching the threshold for some pages/keywords?!

Internetheaven natural search is off because of human reviewing the serps and flag certains site to be a good/bad page!

Aims could be to have influence on natural link building!
Site that arenīt found or arenīt clicked will not get much natural links! So a site on top will not get to many links in a short time because of beeing first in serps.

Strong site will not get to strong to beat them, because of having a treshold.

[tedster]

Maybe we can combine it withe rollercoaster phenomen.

IF traffic throttling is real (and I don't think we've established that, we are just looking at some suggestive data) then some tie in with the Yo-Yo phenomenon would be natural. Your traffic cannot be limited unless your rankings get changed.

What I've seen on the Yo-Yo phenomenon to date seems to be tied more to time than clicks. And of course, whatever this is altogether would affect only certain sites - and my guess is it affects sites whose preliminary rankings shoot up dramatically for the keyword. It's like Google is saying "we're not so sure at this point that our users will really go for this result."

Now how would a webmaster tell the difference between throttling based on clicks and and throttling based on time of day or day of the week? I'd start by watching weekend traffic compared to week day traffic. Unfortunately for this discussion, all the yo-yo urls I know of are not my clients, so I do not have access to the traffic data.

If anyone can do this comparison, I'm all ears, as I assume many of us would be.

[kidder]

I think this situation is very real. Google has so many combinations of results it's almost impossible to tell exactly what is going on. I know we have some high rankings for some high traffic terms that return very lttile traffic. I guess running adwords along side your chosen organic result would give you an idea of actual impressions, that is if you wanted to burn the money..

[vero]

For what it's worth - I've often wondered about what seems to be a threshhold level for my sites. Same as other have said - one day lots of Google traffic to the red widgets section of pages, the next to the green widgets section, and so on, but day to day, overall traffic from Google is pretty steady.

[kidder]

I've seen this with a newish site, it's like a type of sandboxing for want of a better word. We quickly ramped up to a decent level of traffic and then it dropped away. More content, more promotion but the Google traffic dropped down to about half and has stayed there ever since. I suspect we need to break some invisible barrier before the traffic will flow even though it appears we have some decent rankings.

[santapaws]

but guys, do you not see the same constant day to day levels from ALL engines?

[Tyme]

I posted in another thread about this as well and the question that needs answering is what exactly is the barrier that needs breaking? Our site has been suffering from this "sandbox" filtering for many months now. It's very discouraging. Google seems to be testing every one of our main urls. The question of course is when does google finally decide that our urls are worthy of more traffic?
Interesting enough Yahoo seems to be doing the same thing. We do well for one keyword one day in yahoo and than another keyword the next day with the over all traffic never changing.
I really wish there were some answers...

[tedster]

It happens with newish domains, but it also happens with long established domains that suddenly start to rank well (part of the tiime) for a high-volume search that they never ranked well on before.

I've been assuming that Google is looking for end user satisfaction when the higher result is in place, and possibly stronger trust signals in some cases - but those are just two guesses.

Food for thought:
Natural vs. Un-natural - in SEO and the Google Algorithm [webmasterworld.com]

Filters exist - the Sandbox doesn't. How to build Trust. [webmasterworld.com]

[Martin Ice Web]

Tedster,

your rankings change over the day several times. We can track it because we get every little search stored in a database, so we can compare yesterday to today or even now and an hour ago.
We can even say that we had ( and will have ) x visitors at 10 a Clock and y visitors at 12 a Clock. The amount within 15 minutes can change but the overall will be the same even for an hour.

I figured out that, sometimes ( good 15 minutes ) the supplimental pages are back ( very good ) many visitors are coming and suddenly the next 15 min. there only a tens form the previous visitors. But the allover amount for the hour stays the same.

[edited by: Martin_Ice_Web at 12:37 pm (utc) on Oct. 2, 2008]