31 October 2010: 50% increase of traffic

[xnavigator]

Hi guys,

only recently i found out on 31october google made some algo changes.

In that day (only in that day) i got +50% unique visitors.
the day after visitors were back to standard value.

Do i got any chance to reach the 31oct unique today?

[indyank]

yes, most people noticed a traffic spike that sunday...daylight saving could be one reason...but that doesn't explain the 50% hike though...

[xnavigator]

some changes rly happened.

alexa report it too: [blog.alexa.com...]

some dropped some gain uniques

[tedster]

This question is about an algo change that happened ten days later. I don't think the 50% spike reported here on Oct 31 has anything to do with the Oct 22 algo change. It's probably some kind of traffic testing that Google did for xnavigator's domain.

Do i got any chance to reach the 31oct unique today?

It is possible, but not likely since it's been over a month. Whatever Google learned from that test was probably that the traffic they sent wasn't a good fit for your site.

An increase in uniqes is not a good thing on its own - that new traffic needs to be well-targeted to your site too.

To understand your 50% spike further, you should analyze your Google traffic from that day - what query phrases had they searched for, which pages on your site did Google send them to, and did they respond well (low bounce rate, high pages per unique).

[xnavigator]

hmm i thought there was some algo changes because of that post on alexa blog ( [blog.alexa.com...] )

anyway i saw on google analytics that day there weren't new query phrases but my keywords did get better overall ranking.

for the bounce rate, that day like others day it's on my standard level (30-35%)

--

maybe it was just a 1 random test by google :(

[tedster]

Any site can enjoy (or suffer) ranking changes that are not triggered by an widepsread algorithm change. If we were inside Google, we might see that such changes are not "random", strictly speaking. But from the outside, any logic involved can be impossible to figure. That's why I appreciate the reports shared in the "Traffic Shaping" thread somuch.

[xnavigator]

I think some changes that google does are random too.

Google doens't want to let SEO know his algo. Best stuff google can do about it is to do a sporadic random (random strictly speaking) changes to site's ranks.

Anyway considering alexa post I think on 31oct-1Nov there was rlly an algo changes

But ye we can't know much about it

[BillyS]

I think some changes that google does are random too.

Nothing is random with Google. They might perform experiments that affect certain domains, but you can be very sure that nothing is random.