Sudden Surge and Sudden Loss in traffic

[MarcoLee]

Has anyone ever experienced this.

Sometime by august of this year My site traffic went up. I think that was because of a post about a current event (at that time) that everyone was talking about.

It went on for like 4 months, afterwards my site had a sudden drop.

So lately I have been having average traffic, and then by Dec 19 I had a surge again, but it went down again by Dec 24

I thought I was ranking again, but it only laster 4 days.

you can see image of analytics here: [img690.imageshack.us...]

Do you think this is just google changing/updating? Has anyone ever experience this too?

[tedster]

Hello MarcoLee - welcome to the forums.

Some people have been seeing this kind of thing for a good while now. Something like that has been happening for more than a year, and we've been puzzling it over. The best understanding I've seen so far comes out of this discussion: Google & Traffic Shaping - a hidden method to the quality madness? [webmasterworld.com]

In short, my guess is that Google just tested your site for some combination of query term and user profile. Have you taken notice of what search terms brought in the traffic? And from there, are the pages that got the traffic offering good content for that query?

Also worth working on, did the Google traffic stay for a while, or bounce out after one page?