Google has released mobile update?

[realmaverick]

One if my sites had a big 50% increase in traffic. And it's all from iOS and Android.

Mobile and iOS traffic have just taken over desktop.

This happened overnight but I've heard no talk of the update.

Anybody else had an increase in traffic? Please check the devices and report back.

[rustybrick]

Starting when?

[realmaverick]

October 8th at around 9AM PST.

[EditorialGuy]

No change here. For us, mobile traffic always peaks on the weekend, with Sunday being the highest day at 30 to 35 percent over the weekday average.

[realmaverick]

Every hour since 9am on the 8th, our traffic has been up 50% and all from mobile, largely iOS. Maybe Tim Cook sent out an email telling employees how awesome our website is? ;)

[n00b1]

October 8th at around 9AM PST.

September presumably? I haven't noticed anything myself.

[rustybrick]

Maybe it has to do with iOS devices starting to report referrer data via Google instead of direct traffic. Thing is, it happened in August.

[realmaverick]

While that would explain the increase in iOS devices, it wouldn't explain the big increase in traffic.

As this isn't being widely reported, I'm guessing we're part of a small beta test group. Most web masters won't monitor their traffic as closely as I do, and of those that do, it's likely they won't check the browser & OS, so the others that are part of this test group, likely haven't noticed.

I expect a roll out of this imminently.

[roseberry99]

So all traffic is increasing? Not just changing from direct to now being reported differently?

Here's one option:

do you have separate mobile URLs? We saw the same patterns and here's what happens:

iOS updated back in late July (mentioned above as August, but it was actually like July 30, so close enough). So referrers were now passing - no search term data, etc. but at least you were getting the referrer as opposed to just looking like direct traffic before.

However, if you have separate mobile URLs and Google mobile is indexing your non-mobile URLs, then when you do the user agent detection and redirect to the mobile URL, you are basically redirecting the referrer off before and it doesn't get captured in your analytics.

But, Google is now starting to make changes to show the mobile versions directly in the search - when they changed ours it was the whole site all at once showing mobile URLs instead of the standard ones. I know we're not supposed to give examples, but it's a health information site - i'm sure you can find examples for queries in that space in mobile if you wanted.

I would look for your site in Google mobile SERPS and if they are indexing your mobile URLs now, then it's probably that change that made the data look different, but really as a result of the July 30 change to allow referrals in the first place.

If this isn't it and you don't have separate mobile URLs, then you might want to look at any configuration change on your end for mobile traffic that might have an effect on how the passing referrer might be handled.

[diberry]

I'm not seeing this on my sites, one of which already gets a huge portion of its traffic from mobile. But it could be a beta group type thing (I still think the "phantom" update a few days before Penguin 2, which affected my Penguinized site, was a beta test of Penguin 2, and expect Google will be doing more beta testing like that in the future).

[realmaverick]

We have a responsive website.