sharp rise in G traffic

woopwoop · May 29, 2008

has anyone had experience of this and why.

One of my sites receives daily traffic of between 450-600 UVs consistently.
Yesterday it jumped to 1300 + my adsense doubled. PR is the same.

I checked analytics and it seems that the traffic that's google organic increased by a similar margin.

I'm interested to see what happens today if it levels at UVs around 1300 or if it drops back down. Plus what happens with the adsense.

Has anyone else had this and did it level for you or drop again?

stevebrowne · May 29, 2008

I had a site that did this as there was a TV programme on about the subject. It stayed good for 2 days, and then Google manually kicked it down the results to page 10 or something. I know they did it manually, as I have the google IP address of the person who did the "site:" query just before it got zapped. AdSense was great for those 2 days! Now it gets traffic from other SEs but very little from google.

Not sure why they felt the need to kill it so drastically.

woopwoop · May 29, 2008

yep strange... I hope they don't kick mine down to page 10, i'm happy with the 450-600 UVs I was getting before!

Interesting though how the TV thing pushed up the google rankings, and not necessarily inbound links direct to the site...

Will have to keep my eye on it. Fingers crossed it stays up. :???:

stevebrowne · May 29, 2008

to clarify, it had been on page 1 for the search term for 3 or 4 years. OKish regular traffic. The TV prgoramme made click throughs go mental, and then the Google chopper fell down.

So it was fine being there for 4 years, but not fine when too many people wanted to click on it. I don't understand that.

woopwoop · May 29, 2008

There wasn't any black hat seo stuff in your site was there - sometimes that can drop a site.

Really weird though - especially if your site was previously solid for so long.

I just thought back and I had another site where 800 a day dropped to 400. But i always knew that 400 of those were coming from China (long story why) - so i figured that this got chopped. When I checked analytics, it had...

Do you know if there was a correlation between visitor locations with your drop?

stevebrowne · May 29, 2008

no, no black hat; all abiding by the rules.

All the traffic was UK, as it was in direct response to a TV programme that was on. The moment it came on TV, my monitor app was beeping it's little speaker off!

I have actually banned most chinese sub-nets from my servers, as they were mainly posting spam messages to forum areas.

woopwoop · May 29, 2008

Hey what monitor app do you have, that sounds interesting

stevebrowne · May 29, 2008

a little client server thing. I run an app on my PC here, and my websites call a routine under certain conditions that I want to monitor: page load, click on an affiliate link, forum post, lead generation form filled in etc. A message goes to my PC next to me, and it displays what happened, what IP. I colour code the output and have sound effects so I get a feel for what's ging on.

Think of it as an instant web server log, echoed into a window on a monitor next to me.

As there are 200-300 domains using this, it helps me ID BAD IP addresses (ie. lot's of forum posts across different domian names all within seconds of each other).

It also means I can see if paid advert clicks to some lead gen sites are coming through too quickly (and therefore costing me more!).

It's a console app at the moment, but i keep meaning to turn it into a fully configurable windows app so that you could setup what colours, sounds etc. to use, and keep a log.

Admin · May 29, 2008

sounds really cool, can you share it as it is?

stevebrowne · May 29, 2008

not really - it's a bit rough and ready! It works for me, but might not for anyone else. I do intend to do something about it at some point.

woopwoop · May 29, 2008

It does sound like a great tool, I've heard of similar things where it can sms your mobile too if it's triggered.

I've got the sms bit down - just not the rest - I forgot about my plan for something similar a long time ago.

If you feel like adding on an sms bit to your alerts check out clickatell.com
I am not connected with, apart from being a customer.

They have api's and email to sms etc.

DaveH · May 29, 2008

Could be a whole host of things. Is the topic you site about been in the news lately? If all the extra traffic is coming from Google then perhaps they've just ranked your site higher? Why question it if it's going up?

As for alerts etc.. I use SMS under certain conditions on a few of my domains - currently using Webtext.com- no fees, no setups and cheap €7.50 for 100 messages.

woopwoop · May 29, 2008

David Hogan said:
Is the topic you site about been in the news lately? If all the extra traffic is coming from Google then perhaps they've just ranked your site higher? Why question it if it's going up?

Nope the topic is general and so a news story wouldn't push it up. I guess I'm only questioning it to either figure out if it's a temporary pleasure :-D or if I can figure out the why, maybe I can do more of it

and push traffic and revenue even higher.

I'll check out webtext.com, I'd only switch from clickatell if it has some software for my server that I could specify triggers - that's the thing I'm not sure of.

DaveH · May 29, 2008

Then hopefully it's just the site getting more authority from Google. Google tends to favour the more established site from experience.

As for web-text, I'm not sure of any software. I wrote my own using their API, basic but works.