I have been on a rampage, asking people their thoughts and gathering data on exactly how much traffic WebmasterWorld forums. You all know about WebmasterWorld Banning Search Engine Bots from Crawling its site, it was a tough decision I bet, but how tough? My first guess was that WebmasterWorld lost about 30 - 40% of its overall traffic due to being delisted from Google and MSN (soon Yahoo). The one question, I didn't feel comfortable asking Brett in the Interview was how much traffic he lost. I doubt he will tell us, and I don't blame him. But let's guess, at it. First let me tell you what others thought, based on electronic conversations I had with them (they gave me permission in exchange for a link to quote them).
Rae, old time WebmasterWorld member from sugarrae.com, said "I'd guess BT has a crapload of natural traffic." She guesstimated only a loss of about 10 - 20% of overall traffic due to the lose of search engine referrals and she stands by it.
I then asked Daron Babin, SEGuru, from Webmaster Radio his thoughts. He felt it was more in the range of 35-45% of lost traffic.
I also asked Shawn Hogan of Digital Point who estimated more like 50% of lost traffic. But he gave me some very informative statistics, (of course stats are based on assumptions). Here we go...
He tells me about half of his forum traffic is from search engines, I can tell you about half of my traffic (maybe 40%) is from search engine referrals. Shawn puts WebmasterWorld "at loosing 500,000-1M unique visitors per month." He continues to explain, that if you look at Alexa Reach Per Million for WebmasterWorld, you will notice that they went from 2,190 to 1,050, about half of their traffic. But in reality, he explains, that since more WMW members are likely to use the Alexa toolbar, that you can even bump up that figure to WebmasterWorld losing a three-quarters of their traffic. Wow!
Shawn also posted some of this information in Digital Point Forums so discuss it there as well.
