New way to manipulate my google traffic...

Pls don't misread it as maniuplating google ranking

[irock]

Here's my story. I run a [widget] review site like a lot of other people do. My site received 4.5k visitors from Google last Thursday. Then, I started posting new content again... a week later, the number skyrockted to 5.3k. That's 0.8k unique visitors... that's 17% increase!

I would seem I can maniulate traffic... It's actually not the first time I did this experiement. I let my site 'dead' or stop updating for a couple of weeks. Traffic dropped 20% from google during the period.

Then posting content back for a week raised my google traffic by 15 to 25%.

I couldn't find out which keyword ranking on google gave me all these traffic, because a content site has so much content that my stats program tells me I have over referrals from 2000+ different keyword phrases.

So, my questions:

1. How do I keep trakc of google performance when I don't know which keywords to track?

2. Why is this happening? My guess there's some kind of chain reaction going on... just a wild speculation though.

[edited by: ciml at 3:03 pm (utc) on May 14, 2004]
[edit reason] Widgetised [/edit]

[zgb999]

Adding new content is always helpful...

New content gets a bost for a short time. Because of that the new pages can attract many new visitors.

Get a stats software where you can track which keywords a certain page got Google referrers from. Like that you can see what people are looking for that are coming to the new content.

[irock]

zgb999,

Thanks for your reply. THe problem with keyword ranking comes down to having 2000+ different keyword combinations that are already sending traffic to my pages. So, there is just so MUCH noise I really couldn't figure out how to begin the analysis.

?

[zgb999]

Sorry if I didn't make myself clear enough.

I am using Webtrends Reporting Center. There I have made a custom report that shows me for each page of a site what keywords that people used that got to that page from search engines.

I don't think you will have 2000 keywords for one single page. Even if you do you can check what keywords most people used that got to page A (new content) and what keywords most people used that got to page B (new content)...

[irock]

Oh okay...

What happen if I have over 2000 pages... I guess a lot of them don't get any traffic at all.

What I really need is something that can tell me which keywords are giving me more traffic, and the top twenty pages that receive most traffic from google.

BTW, is Webtrends Reporting Center expensive? I have about 700k page views a month.

[SmilS]

There are more versions of Webtrends with different prising. On their site man can download tryouts and also see some interesting videos.

The WebmasterWorld tread Tracking and Logging ist also very informative by the choise of webstatistic-software.

[georgiek50]

You should also give Weblog expert a shot, it analyzes traffic logs and puts out many nice reports. It costs $79 and you can evaluate it for free for 30 days. You can find it on a lot of software sites such as: [snapfiles.com...]

Have fun!

[expert_21]

you can try weblog expert lite - free.

[whiteperfect]

How would you guys put those data and reports you have collected to good use?

[mars9820]

Am I missing something?

You say you let your site "dead" and traffic goes down for 20 percent and when you bring back the data you get back that 20 percent.

What is so special about this? In the end you end up with the same traffic right?

Like 5000 a day before.
4000 a day when you remove the pages or "dead page"
5000 a day when you update the page and it is active again.

Confused.

[irock]

mars9820,

Well, there's nothing to brag about the traffic... i was simply trying to point out that webmasters aren't always passive when dealing with Google traffic... we still have some limited control unlike other search engines. By next Thursday, my site could be getting another 20% more traffic from Google.

[pakopmaat]

Small correction for mars9820:

If your website from 5000 visits looses 20% it drops to 4000. It then needs an increase of 25%! (25% of 4000 = 1000) to get back to 5000 again

[mars9820]

pakopmaat. He said he dropped 20 percent and later gained 25 percent. (in post 1). I was just to lazy to type it that way since the numbers were making it much more clear.

irock: OK. now things get more clear. You create more pages that will generate more traffic. Makes good sense to me. If you stop to create more content you will keep in balance. And if you remove pages you drop in traffic.

However this is not SEO specific but just common practise.

It might be more interesting if you modify your navigation or titles/meta's and you will increase 20 or 30 percent in traffic on your EXISTING pages.

If that is the case you find a way to "manipulate" your ranking.

[irock]

And if you remove pages you drop in traffic.

I haven't removed any pages... but if I stop posting content for like 2 weeks, google traffic will start to drop. But the thing is... I don't know which pages get less traffic.

[shrirch]

irock,

At some time (I've seen your site a number of times) you have to give up targetting single phrases and go for the organic search phrases.

You can tune your traffic by placing emphasis on money words like discounted, compare prices etc.

One of our sites, very similar to what you do (except we cant be half bothered with the writing new / original phrases part) generates about 10K unique searches a day with 2-6 phrase searches. 20% of the searches have our targetted money words in them, so, mission accomplished.

Finally, the drop in traffic might be related to your site returning 304s to google -- I have been meaning to bring this up for a while.

[coburn]

What you may be experiencing (barring G changes in algo) is G's frequency of visits. If you don't change a thing for a few week, G picks this up and indexes less often. As soon as you add or alter again, G picks this up and looks at your site more regularly - giving you more chance of the new content gaining visitors.

You've not mentioned whether your edits and adds have been SE optimised - this always helps your rankings and commensurate traffic. Most important is optimising your page titles.

So if you leave your site for a few months, Google will consider it a dated site and you'll see yourself dropping in the SERPs. The answer is in the detail. I'm surprised that you've not targeted certain keywords and tracked their SERP regularly.

I'd echo getting hold of Weblog Expert.

[getadsensed]

I've noticed that when you intall new script too traffic increases

[gemini]

I also noticed that traffic changes sometimes very unexpectedly. Then I looked at my crawlers log just for google and saw it pretty clear that as soon as I change something googlebot is beating my site to death :) For the month of April the lowest amount of heats per day by googlebot was 227 and the highest 823. In total I had 14.6K hits by gb for the whole month. I think that explains a lot when your average traffic raises twice and than you see that you've got 200 more pages indexed :) But it doesn't last for long time. I mesure my traffic in leads captured - if they go down from average week - I know there is something wrong, but even though I have my traffic increasing a lot sometimes - my leads are very steady.

[Larryhat]

External and unpredictable things factor in too.

I have a UFO related site. Last week I was amazed to see hits nearly quadrupled when the computer came up, my index.html is my home page.

Checking the emails I saw why. There was this big todo about the Mexican military revealing an instrumented sighting last March. The wires were burning up with it.

That tapered off of course, but visits are still 50% above normal 6 days later. Best - Larry