Forum Moderators: Robert Charlton & goodroi
To clarify my interpretation of Google Traffic Throttling before continuing: we get almost exact traffic amounts from Google and have done since late last year (Yahoo, Bing, Referral and Direct traffic always varies). The Google traffic graph is so predictable I could draw next week's and not be far off.
My understanding of how Google is accomplishing this with my site (I'm sure some sites are throttled differently) is moving us around in the rankings. We bounce from the ever-theorised-number-4 position to no-where, from No.9 to No.900 and so on throughout the day but the jumps are not predictable. I never know which page is going to be tanked from day to day but it is always a few decent traffic pages that suddenly vanish.
Why does this mean I have to reduce services? Well, almost 90% of my site's pages are user-based - industry news and consumer comments. Ads do not convert well on those pages. Our commercial sections convert very well.
This means that if our "traffic allowance" is used up by people visiting the news/discussion pages, we see a dramatic drop in visitors from Google to our commercial pages. If you put the news pages graph over the commercial pages graph it is simply amazing. The drops in commercial traffic correspond with increase in news traffic. When news traffic is low (Sat, Sun, Mon in our industry) the commercial traffic is much higher.
But the totals never pass our allotted Google traffic.
What would you do? Would you stop providing free services altogether so that your whole traffic allowance goes toward commercial pages?
Someone said that links get you out of traffic throttling, but after almost a year and thousands of links we have seen no movement ... other than an increase in our daily Google allowance of 100 visitors a couple of months ago. Is that the rate? Every 12 months and 5,000 links we are allowed another 100 visitors per day?
So if several different people were to buy a bunch of domains from Godaddy, use their privacy services (so all whois is the same) and use Godaddy for hosting too (so IPs are similar) -- all those people might be seen as one individual?
Maybe, maybe not. But how likely is it that those different people would all have domains following the pattern of "great-bargain-deals-on-paris-hotels.com," "great-bargain-deals-on-london-hotels.com," and "great-bargain-deals-on-new-york-hotels.com," with sites that use the same layouts, navigation schemes, and links between domains? Networks like those (and there are many of them) obviously should be treated as single entities from a search engine's point of view.
If that is actually happening, it would explain a lot about some of the seemingly inexplicable Google behavior that is posted on this board. For example, here's a few topics from the past weeks:
"Position 1 ranking appears and disappears twice a month"
"Website keeps dropping in and out of SERPS for a while now"
"Site goes from Google at random caches and then comes back"
"Index page vanished from Google SERPs"
I'm concluding that I'll need to check my site positioning at widely varying times before I panic about any changes I see. If at 10am on the 25th day of the month I see an unexplained drop, I won't assume anything until I can run the same test at 4pm on the 3rd of the next month, and then again at around 8pm on the 12th, etc etc.
There are some things about our sites we can change in order to (hopefully) impact our SERP position in a positive manner, but if throttling is real, it's out of our hands.
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if throttling is real, it's out of our hands.
If throttling is real (it seems to be), then Google still only applies it in some situations. The idea would be to discover what are those situations, and correct those factors.
You don't need to monitor rankings to see throttling. Just monitor your Google traffic by the specific keyword. If a keyword's graph is flat, day after day, then it's throttled. The mechanism Google uses to create a throttle may be a ranking yo-yo, but there definitely are ranking yo-yos that do not create a traffic flatline.
- Is it triggered when a site hits a certain level based on specific keywords, or total Google clickthroughs in general?
- Are individual pages targeted for the throttle, or is it by TLD?
- Can this happen every day, or is it triggered by the week, or when a monthly total is reached, or some other date/time measurement?
- If every day for example, do we start fresh at 12:01am? If every month, do we start fresh on the 1st?
As I mentioned in my previous post, what many of us see as a "penalty" may be more accurately attributed to throttling, and as you replied, figuring that out is the key.
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Backlink spikes could be measured directly by googlebot. However, to account for all the dynamic ranking factors, sudden spikes in ranking might be measured by how many impressions the URL gets in the SERPs.
It's not that a spike can trigger the throttling all on its own, but rather a spike that is not related to a similar spike in user searches for that topic. In other words - they're looking for "too much conventional SEO".
A domain-wide or even network-wide traffic throttle is not something I've seen data for. But it certainly could be in play, and I will keep an eye out for it.
I'm also looking for the best way to escape a throttle. My guess is that a more diverse backlink profile, especially with editorial links, would raise the trust factor enough to remove the ceiling, but that would probably be done gradually.
From reading this patent [webmasterworld.com], it seems the throttle could be applied at almost any level. The key question for me is how fast must the traffic or ranking growth be to get classified as a "spike".
Also, most of my data is now a few months old. I suspect that Google has taken steps to make the throttling mechanism less dramatically obvious.
Traffic starts at midnight, peaks at 2am, and then tapers off. By 7 am it is nothing. Then Google traffic starts the next day at midnight and does the same thing.
The problem that I see is this -- if it's a commercial site, then he/she needs to have a product or service that can be purchased well outside their own time zone. So if they're located in NY, then at 5am (when the keyword is still ranking) it's 2am in CA, a time when there's not a lot of purchasing, but it is 10am in London, when people would be buying. But if this site does not service the UK, then the better ranking is of no real value.
So if their customer base is mostly located in their own or adjoining time zones, and are the kind of people who use the internet during normal working hours (9am to 9pm), then this siteowner may be in trouble. By the time those people are ready to shop, the throttle effect has kicked in.
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Not only that, but aggressively chasing a specific ranking can actually hurt you, especially if you just accpet SEO advice from various sources and then act on it without a depth of understanding.
It's possible that nothing internetheaven did would have sounded problematic just a few years ago. I'll bet there is SEO advice on the web right now, even so-called "white hat" advice, that recommends every single step that ended up in this traffic throttling he is wrestling with.
I'll bet there is SEO advice on the web right now, even so-called "white hat" advice, that recommends every single step that ended up in this traffic throttling he is wrestling with.
Yes, I took Google's SEO advice!
This is the only site where I've obtained natural links and developed content for users etc. Natural links = spikes here and there, uncontrolled anchor text and low-quality links (i.e. mostly from new pages).
Back to regular-SEO ... what was I thinking listening to Google's advice on how to rank well!?!?!
Our content meanwhile continues to grow by about 1% a day...
I use to believe in the "throttle" theory... until I starting a new way of looking at my site. I realized that yes my content was growing, but it was not branching out enough. Hence, I had maxed out my buckets. I could keep dropping new content into the same buckets, but those buckets were only capable of giving me so much traffic, so I was pegged.
I'm now working on adding new buckets to the site... we'll see how it goes.
I realized that yes my content was growing, but it was not branching out enough.
I don't see this throttling as "either/or" -- it seems to me that within the finite number of searches being done on any one topic per day, Google could still find it advantageous to move the SERPs around, if there's enough quality sites to fulfill the queries.
That's the key -- all things must be approximately equal -- crummy sites cannot be moved up and quality sites pushed down -- they each must have useful value for "throttling" to make any sense.
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Your basics: 10% high converting pages, 90% user generated low converting pages.
Step #1 - Interlink related pages. There are some good apps and plugins available for this or you can do it manually.
Step #2 - Figure out what ratio of related links/total pages works best for your site, trial and error over time.
Step #3 - Throttle those links. This is a little more complicated but the majority (or all) of those internal links should point to your high converting pages only, never to a low converting page.
If you get those 3 steps right the importance of your high converting pages will increase dramatically and will receive more traffic. In fact each new user generated page will essentially create new links pointing to those pages, Google will get the idea of their importance.
If you DON'T do this each new user generated page dilutes the importance of your high converting pages more and more over time. I find that applying these 3 simple steps to categories works best, put all your "fluff" type articles into a category that the interlinking code of your choice will not link to etc.
It works, take it from someone who thought he was being throttled for a long time. Google WANTS to drive traffic to the most important pages, you just need to make sure that a) the pages are important and b) you TELL google they are.
Good luck with that!
edit: I don't recommend making drastic changes to established sites. I don't recommend pointing all internal links to a very small percentage of pages. I don't recommend you expect much from changing already published pages, links on NEW pages are weighed more heavily than new links on old pages imo... this was just a VERY basic guide, don't flame me. Also, a properly interlinked site will have a lower pagerank on index and higher pagerank (and traffic) accross key articles. If PR on index is important to you, don't do it.
this applies even to a group of domains and the adsense revenues.
-100 or plus a few hundreds in cash and traffic.
Certain industry sites remain in the top 20 over longer periods.
But i had started a similar thread some time ago, and all said, that Google doesn`t use traffic and adsense rev caps.
What would happen if you will buy some traffic ... how will Google handle that ?
My data is limited to a few sites, all with GTB Ranking limited to 2's and 3's and the occasional 4 or 5.
All sites seem to plateau as described here and previous threads as 'throttling' however I always thought that this was a result of saturating the market within that link-sphere.
I took this as a sign of a job well done and that my sites were being held in check by competitors using fair or unfair means.
Perhaps my question belongs in its own thread but here goes:
How does one tell 'throttling' from the results of fair / unfair competitive pressures?
Presumably this is by watching daily traffic patterns, right?
How does one tell that this throttling is not a result of a clever competitor doing day parting to position themselves in the right spot at the right time?
I'm sure there are other theories that might emerge as well.
internetheaven, I don't think it's any kind of throttling on the part of Google. I think the change in rank on your key terms is due to the nature of your audience and key terms.
almost 90% of my site's pages are user-based - industry news and consumer comments.
Like WW? Search on "goggle throttling" on google and you'll get this page in the #1 position. Spell google correctly and you'll see a lot more different results.
My point? People screw up search all of time with linking and such. You are obviously doing a good job of serving your market. The problem is, your users are people. Human make mistakes and Google believes them to be right. Also, they are linking to your forums on and off, mis-spellling, and jerking around your keywords.
Get rid of the people! I find that most business operations see a great improvement when they have fewer people involved. Especially customers and employees and vendors.
Otherwise, it looks like you're doing a great job of managing your site.
How does one tell 'throttling' from the results of fair / unfair competitive pressures? Presumably this is by watching daily traffic patterns, right?
Exactly - watch search traffic by the hour.
How does one tell that this throttling is not a result of a clever competitor doing day parting to position themselves in the right spot at the right time?
A competitor cannot mess with free organic traffic to this degree, not just by day-parting their paid Adwords campaign. They'd have to take away every single organic click!
If you have a set amount of PageRank, but double the number of pages on your site, then mathmatically it stands to reason that the amount of PageRank per page will be watered down by some amount. If these extra services you offer come with additional links/pages, then this is certainly figuring into your results. As you water down your PR, your more popular pages start to drop in some ranking positions, reducing the traffic coming in on them.
A domain-wide or even network-wide traffic throttle is not something I've seen data for. But it certainly could be in play, and I will keep an eye out for it.
A troublemaker might perhaps be adsense with multiple domains in 1 account.
Although I am not hands-on with the traffic data for some other cases, I have some reports that are quite interesting: when the main keyword gets cut off, the long tail searches pop up much higher. Now that would be some fancy dancing!
One term will drop out and something else will take it's slot. I mentioned this years ago and everyone thought I was nuts. We have been clearly been throttled in some fashion.
It's all good and I dont mind to be honest. The site gets twice that traffic on it's own so whatever google feels like sending my way I am grateful for.
This is just my personal opinion but I feel once a site meets certain criteria it gets reviewed and a limitation is set on the overall domain and the traffic gets balanced out. Google certainly has had the computing power to do this for a very long time.
If it's just limiting single pages, can't you just create new topics/pages and get more traffic overall?
In other words, if you had a total of 100 pages with a "traffic limit" of 2,500 pageviews per day, couldn't you just create another 100 pages and get 5,000 views/day?
Obviously this may not be ideal, but I'm curious based on your speculation of this traffic manipulation.
I think you need new content to grow, and it must be searched upon frequently, unique and worthwhile. Sure, more links will boost your rankings for certain pages, but that takes time. And the increase in traffic may be marginal at best, keeping traffic seemingly steady.
If anything, maybe this just tells us that your Google traffic is consistent because search rankings don't actually change all that much.
One term will drop out and something else will take it's slot. I mentioned this years ago and everyone thought I was nuts. We have been clearly been throttled in some fashion.
If it's just limiting single pages, can't you just create new topics/pages and get more traffic overall?
How many ways can you say "widget"?
Everything else is an adjective or even an adverb. What remains is "widget".
Point of diminishing returns...if not the proverbial point of no return...
So is the "traffic throttling" supposedly limiting the website traffic overall, or just individual pages?
What I've seen is throttling traffic for one keyword/landing page. And it's NOT all that common, either -- the sky is not full of helicopters ;)
Our current discussion about Google's backlink patent [webmasterworld.com] has more detail.
Consider a restaurant that opens up on a city street and is the only game in town. Then five more similar spots open up...if you're still getting the same amount of customers, that's not terrible news.
Think of it another way; when you see "Results 1 - 10 of about 44,300,000," it's hard to imagine ranking well for everything, let alone anything.
Of course, you always want to be growing, but steady traffic isn't necessarily bad. And like I mentioned earlier, if you want more traffic, you need to change things up or bring in something new.
And yes, a widget is a widget. So if you feel you've maxed out a topic, I guess it's times to focus on another one. Perhaps you can't dominate 100 different search phrases all pointing to one page.
[edited by: tedster at 7:54 am (utc) on Aug. 13, 2009]
Google looks at all your domain information. Links between similar domains are less trusted then links that appear at virtual distance. (you'll find this in the patent too)
Google also rates your website to how much traffic they think you should get, traffic will be throttled if your going to far out of this range.
Maybe split content out of your website to create a whole new but simular/related website.
