google referral surge

then down the tube

[brianlmoon]

Last year, from May-Nov, we had horrible google listing. We discovered that a robots.txt file on our session domain was causing the problem. Google was simply not getting to us. So, we removed that and within 30 days we went from 17 referrals per day to 921. Those numbers grew to a peak of over 3000 in late Jan. As spring moved along, we expected a fall off. It did happen. We saw number drop as low as 900/day by late May. Then on May 28, we dropped off the face of google again with no major change on our part. Our daily referrals are climbing again, near 700.

We made no significant changes to our page layout. Our content does change rapidly, at a blog-like pace. We are not a blog however.

I am not really here at the knowledge of my company and they would probably not want me telling exact numbers like this.

I am wondering if the surge we saw early was because we had not been indexed for so long and that somehow caused the Google spiders to favor us.

Anyone else have a similar experience?

[diamondgrl]

We have likewise faced a large drop in Google referrals at the end of May/beginning of June (25-33%). I figured some of that could be a drop in PR from 7 to 6 for the main page, but also because of slowdown due to the summer.

Our site tends to attract the professional, business-oriented folks and there are a lot of vacations in the summer, particularly in other parts of the world where we have heavy readership.

I have limited data from previous years to compare with and would love to know whether others face a significant summer decline in traffic and therefore business.