Crazy burst of traffic from Yahoo for one specific term.

Strangest thing ever...

[Perfection]

This is pretty odd. Today, out of no where, a search term that I rank well for on Yahoo but which never sends anything remotely close to a lot of traffic is now all of a sudden sending Digg-effect type traffic. I'm talking 1000's of unique visits with an hour or 2.

The visitors all have completely different ip addresses and locations and browsers and stuff like that, so it's not just someone messing around.

It's kind of like someone linked to a Yahoo SERP (why?), and that link is sending an insane amount of traffic to that specific SERP, and then most of these people are clicking on my site in the results.

It's starting to die down a little bit, but traffic is still coming. Anyone ever see anything like this before or have any idea what the hell it's all about?

[martinibuster]

Topical? Anything in the news?

[Perfection]

Nope, not at all. And even if it was, the traffic is coming from a semi-long tail 3 word search term.

[edited by: Perfection at 9:17 pm (utc) on Oct. 21, 2008]

[robzilla]

One of today's top searches on the Yahoo! homepage?

[Perfection]

Ah, good guess and would have explained it perfectly, but my search term isn't there. It's probably something exactly like this though... just can't find it.

[robzilla]

Those top searches are updated throughout the day (in fact, right now I'm already seeing different search terms compared to half an hour ago), but if visitors are still flowing in, that's probably not it. Perhaps they're rotated. Don't know your keyphrase, so I have no idea what to look for, and since you're saying it's dying down a bit, chances of finding the source become slimmer. Yahoo! has quite a few portals, blogs and services that link directly to search results, like Buzz and News, so it's tough. If you're seeing massive amounts of traffic though, I'd be inclined to think they're coming from something linked on the homepage.

Good for you, by the way :-)

[Perfection]

HA, yeah, thanks. =) Actually, while it has died down quite a bit, it's still bringing about 5 unique visits per minute.

But I'm beginning to think you are definitely correct. Somewhere on Yahoo, they are linking to this search phrase. No idea where, but I certainly won't complain.

[BillyS]

I experienced this type of event maybe two months ago. This was a three word term that was sending me about 1,500 visitors an hour for about two hours before things started to quiet down.