Google Traffic Quality Throttling - at Certain Times or Days

[stuartc1]

I know this has been mentioned in various threads since mayday updates. It also relates to several other active topics, but I think it warrants its own thread.

In the past my site had steady sales throughout the week - with the exception of weekends. However, lately I've noticed that I get no orders for days at a time, and then bang 8 orders in the space of a few hours. This has been happening for weeks now... and it’s always the same day of the week.

It's almost like Google are positioning my website in the search results based on time variables, and the class of searcher (people who are more likely to buy something against people who are just looking). The weird thing is the ‘search terms’ do not seam to be a factor in quality of traffic. Personalized search may be a factor.

Has anyone else noticed this more recently? and more importantly, does anyone have any advice on how to get better quality traffic more frequently?

[scottsonline]

100% seeing this. Aside of normal boosts in traffic from stuff like a big social pickup or msm mention we are in a yo-yo.

[tedster]

Some of the recent reports include spurts of Google traffic that come from non-optimal geographic areas (during the poor times) followed by a period of geographically normal traffic. When I read about that kind of thing and couple it with complaints from various countries that their SERPs show periods of many out-of-country websites, I wonder about the bigger picture of which these are just smaller pieces.

[stuartc1]

Sorry to hear that you have noticed this also scottsonline - hopefully the yo-yo will settle soon.

tedster:

..When I read about that kind of thing and couple it with complaints from various countries that their SERPs show periods of many out-of-country websites, I wonder about the bigger picture of which these are just smaller pieces.

Thanks for your reply tedster, this could certainly explain some of effects I've been seeing. It doesn't seem like there's anything webmasters can do about it, other than just wait and see if things settle down.

[dvduval]

Let's say there are 100 keywords for a niche, and there are about 10,000 searches per day. I am seeing a formula where some sites get "assigned" keywords that will mathematically put them in a range (ex. 800-1200 searches per day).

You might find that SiteA truly is more about Keyword #1, but SiteB has been assigned that keyword, so it gets more traffic for Keyword #1.

What can be especially tough is when SiteA is a smaller brand name, and 500 of those searches are on the brand, leaving SiteA with a smaller share of the remaining keywords due to their brand recognition. So then SiteB (with less brand recognition) gets more traffic for keywords in the niche as a result.

I believe this can happen in reverse when you are dealing with a brand that google has "marked". In that case, the brand keywords don't count against the "keyword allotment" so then they get the 800-1200 searches PLUS brand searches.

But in the case of smaller brands that are not recognized by google, their branding actually "steals" traffic from the niche.

That has been my observation. Has anyone else seen this.

[stuartc1]

I think you may be on to something there.

My observation - I look after a website with the domain name containing three search words 'best blue widgets' (keyword domain). Now I know for a fact that it ranked number one for many years for that term. There are tens of thousands of high quality backlinks (all natural).

For a while now an exact search brings that site up number two (in the top level google domains), number one is actually very poor with little backlinks or value. It's clearly decided to knock off a few marks because of the exact match.

The interesting part is that a lot of traffic does come from lots of other countries now (in the past it was mainly US and UK, now its Netherlands, Germany and India for example).

I wonder if google are rotating traffic to other countries intentionally in order to gain trends on keyword or brand search patterns against domain named result popularity.

As you say dvduval, there seems to be an allocated number of good quality traffic assigned to a given sites, and seems to be based on brand ‘v’ keywords.

Suspicion – Google are given you 40% or 60% good traffic now (in comparison to before), if you want more – buy some ads. They have used up just about all the other tricks they had waiting for rainy days (i.e. ad placements above organic with almost invisible background to trick users, personalized results, geo-based results, and many others). They need to keep the profits up each quarter.

[Status_203]

Cycling traffic amongst domains in order to pick up usage information?

[tedster]

I wonder if google are rotating traffic to other countries intentionally

Also possible that they are having major problems with how to use user location data in "customizing" results. Especially now that the "Results from country" button is removed