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A WebmasterWorld thread where webmasters keep track of every little move at Google is noticing some significant shifts in the Google search results over the past few days.
There are webmasters claiming huge traffic swings, up and down 40% at different times of the day and on different days.
The reports started coming in on February 6th or so and more and more webmasters are complaining of those shifts as of yesterday.
A couple of people even said their rankings are the same but their traffic dropped 40%.
Here are some quotes:
I'm ranking the same and my traffic was cut by 35-40%
I lost about 30% of my traffic over the weekend.
According to GA two of our sites are 35% UP yet sales are near ZERO!
Are you noticing major changes in the Google search results over the past few days?
Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.
Image credit to ShutterStock for shuffle dancer image.
Comments:
Bill
02/09/2012 02:26 pm
Interesting. Across the sites I monitor I have not seen any big changes like that. Whoever wrote that might want to check and make sure it was not a reporting issue with GA or a glitch with the code. To me that sounds more like a site reporting issue. We did notice a some issues last month similar to that, and it turned out to be our analytics tools that were causing the issues and not an actual site/Google issue. What does everyone else think?
Alex Genadinik
02/09/2012 02:40 pm
Interesting - over this time, I have had similar traffic, but my AdSense CTR dropped. Google is being fishy again, screwing webmasters. Thanks google :)
Jaan Kanellis
02/09/2012 02:51 pm
Bill I am seeing huge drops in GA numbers. across many sites. I guessing it is temporary glitch in GA. This has happened dozens of times to us in the past. Most of the time GA updates the numbers after a few days. I suggest webmaster check their hourly numbers and look at how the traffic is normal some hours and then totally gone other hours. Now that is not normal.
Digital Climb
02/09/2012 03:38 pm
I think this is the most likely outcome. Although, I have not noted any major traffic variations.
Belindasuva
02/09/2012 05:43 pm
absolutely. huge ups and downs in rankings on some terms that show increasing searchvolumes. Think its lazy content. On those trendy terms we need to update more regularly
Fasalqureshi
02/09/2012 05:56 pm
I guess Google is trying to filter the acual quality traffic and the unreleated ones.
Webnauts
02/09/2012 07:34 pm
Recently Google announced: "We improved how Panda interacts with our indexing and ranking systems, making it more integrated into our pipelines."Could that probably be the case?
Maria
02/09/2012 09:00 pm
Interesting...have to check it out. I haven't noticed a major change in my ranking what so ever. Well be in the look out, thanks!
Ben
02/09/2012 09:32 pm
One of our partners had one of their competitors completely drop out of existence. They hung in on the first page for competitive keywords in their industry for awhile. Just a couple days ago, I cannot even find them. I'm talking JCPenny-esque. If you do poor quality work then panic. If you have quality control then don't sweat it.
Jon Loomer
02/09/2012 09:56 pm
Count me among the people who are seeing positive changes. Though it's not clear the source. I had chalked it up to making reading/commenting on other blogs part of my daily routine. I actually wrote about this just today: http://www.jonloomer.com/2012/02/09/new-proof-of-the-correlation-between-google-referrals-and-blog-commenting/ My traffic has become much more consistent over the past 10 days due to having much stronger referrals from Google and not having to rely on referrals from Facebook. I had a day recently that saw one third the total traffic of a day earlier in the month, but double the number of Google referrals. Pretty noticeable shift, whatever the cause. And I like it.
Nathaniel Bailey
02/10/2012 09:42 am
Let me guess, people that are seeing this are seeing it on google.com where the new Search Plug Your World is on as default? If you watch trends for different times in social networking I would bet that you will notice some similarities in those and the changes on your sites stats! In other words SPYW is what's messing up your stats and so people need to change how they get targeted traffic to their sites from personalised search results, not just organic results.
India Tours
02/10/2012 12:55 pm
I think this is the most likely outcome. Although, I have not noted any major traffic variations.
James Winsoar
02/13/2012 05:57 pm
The format of the search results page changed in the past week too.
Sunsetinaden
02/23/2012 11:16 am
I have seen huge change. I was having 50+ solid No.1 rankings and have the top notch page in my niche. 1 week ago, 80% of my keywords rank -5 to -10, not a single No. 1 ranking anymore, most of my high traffic words are not in search anymore. Something has changed - big time. Traffic us cut by -60% at this moment.
ZacharyWilliamson
02/28/2012 02:38 am
Its just not possible that your rankings remained the same but your traffic dropped... you must be looking at your rankings while logged in to Google or viewing their new "Search Plus Your World" results. Otherwise, their would have to be a radical shift in your market or industry.