have u guys observing drastic drop in traffic since thursday?...... is it because of easter?
few other webmasters are also observing 30-40% drop in traffic which is a lot more compared to previous year during easter, also easter doesnt start till friday,... so a drop in traffic from thursday is quite strange and worrisome
is this a new update? or its just due to easter?... what do u guys suggest?
garyr_h
3:14 pm on Apr 9, 2012 (gmt 0)
@besnette hit in Panda Feb 2011, April 2011, and December 2011, recover some in March 23 only to see fall downward since then.
peego
4:50 pm on Apr 9, 2012 (gmt 0)
Our main site was hit Feb, Apr last year. Never recovered, but kept sinking. Traffic dropped 20%ish starting last thurs, and into the weekend. Dunno if its google or easter... or both.
hitchhiker
5:47 pm on Apr 9, 2012 (gmt 0)
@besnette panda *increased* my traffic every single time (+10% most times) till last thursday..
venti
6:08 pm on Apr 9, 2012 (gmt 0)
We saw a dip on Thursday and Friday with Saturday and Sunday bringing a little better than typical numbers. Taking the holiday into consideration, I am curious if this was a bump or just a fluke of some sort (weekend traffic).
Did notice some SERP movement Sunday night.
gehrlekrona
2:56 am on Apr 10, 2012 (gmt 0)
Google: 34.5% Bing: 31.4% Yahoo: 26.1% Ask: 7.2% AOL: .8% Interesting numbers. Bing almost as big as Google and together all other SE are a LOT bigger than Google. Is this because ppl can't find anything good in Google anymore and goes to other SE. It seems like but don't know for sure.
DirigoDev
3:03 am on Apr 10, 2012 (gmt 0)
Overall session counts for PPC and SEO are steady - right where they should be for Easter weekend. Friday was real good. Sales were ugly on Saturday despite good traffic. Sunday - sales and sessions were down. Today (4/9) was a disaster at about 50% of normal sales. Worst Monday from a sales standpoint in 314 weeks. Why? Google! We don't have bad days like this. Never.
We got hit by Panda II but fully recovered from a traffic perspective. Rankings, for the most part, are back to pre-Panda levels. Sales never returned to pre-Panda. SEO session starts exceed pre-Panda. My guess is that we're still in some sort of Panda sandbox - one with lots of unqualified traffic. The index is all over the place. Up for a few hours and then down for a few. And when we reach our daily allotment of sales early in the day – they throttle us and kill the day. We have really good days and really bad days. It seems very random. Pre-panda things were 100% predictable. Folks, this is by design. Get used to it.
We've been a pure-play internet firm for 10 years with y/y growth until last April's Panda 2. I'm pretty sick of being jerked around by Google who is my biggest advertising channel via PPC. Radio starts later this week. We're moving into traditional media so that Google no longer has such control. We cannot control our sales/revenue because Google is in control. The days of being a pure-play are over.
Future
8:20 pm on Apr 11, 2012 (gmt 0)
Hello, Any updates to this ? Was it easter or some update again after 23rd March ?
SnowMan68
8:24 pm on Apr 11, 2012 (gmt 0)
It feels like something happened last night. Our G traffic is up about 20% from Monday-Tuesday and 30-35% from last week. Nothing is confirmed though.
chalkywhite
8:14 am on Apr 13, 2012 (gmt 0)
Came into office this morning and checked the overnight stats as per normal, down 30% on a normal start to the day. Anyone seeing any changes?
petehall
9:26 am on Apr 13, 2012 (gmt 0)
@chalkywhite the update has hit your sector. Has been happening to people each Thursday night since mid March.
The cycle repeats at the end of each week... but does not affect everyone at once. Every Friday someone new comes on here and reports a 30% hit.
At first I thought it was a penalty, but it's not.
@SnowMan68 I would be interested to know when you can confirm the increase. My personal thoughts are this isn't something anyone can react to and fix as it's due to changes with synonyms / related words in searches.
SnowMan68
11:09 am on Apr 13, 2012 (gmt 0)
@ petehall
We saw the jump of 30% on Wednesday and maintained it yesterday. It was mostly across the long tail. It took about two and half weeks to see any recovery. We aren't back to where we were numbers wise from Jan-Late March though. Still have about 10% to go. Now the question is...will it hold? I'll keep you posted.
irishsolar
11:21 am on Apr 13, 2012 (gmt 0)
Bing almost as big as Google ...Is this because ppl can't find anything good in Google anymore and goes to other SE.
You are not alone noticing this. Webmasters in another thread have also commented on this. I am also noticing a dramatic increase in Bing referrals.
Running the risk of sounding bitter and "wishful" I do think Bing results are much more relevant than Google's and the site's they are returning are a lot more trustworthy. If you go deep into the top sites Google is returning many times you will find weak content that is spun or scraped from other sites.
It seems the SERPs are constantly changing with garbage surfacing, being removed and then replaced with different garbage.
It is possible the "sort" is still going on but I am dismayed that in a few niches I am looking at the same spam sites are holding their (high) ground. Anyone else seeing this?
petehall
11:47 am on Apr 13, 2012 (gmt 0)
@SnowMan68 my results here don't look that great again - especially long tail, however at home (I'm in work now) for the past two days they have looked much better and my stats indicate this too.
I think we're being served two sets of data at the moment and one of them is much improved on long tail.
Also the other set has updated site links - these are now gone from my results here.
Sgt_Kickaxe
9:55 am on Apr 14, 2012 (gmt 0)
Easter rollout, the one day traffic spike has passed.
