The traffic was good from Google and it didn't change a lot up and down and I was pretty pleased with it. Could have been better but since Google was the only one (99.9%) sending me traffic it wasn't too bad. I have people signing up for free advertising and if they want to pay extra for a better place with image and stuff then they could do that so it was a pretty good business, I thought. Now Big Daddy came along and from there is has just gone down and down and down........ Old pages I used 5-6 years ago started to show up in ther search results, new and old pages showed up as supplemental pages, one day I had 45,000 pages indexed, next day 5 pages. I searched for the keywords I have been using for years but I had to scroll down to page 55 to even find my site while there were hundreds of sites above that with strange domain names and just MFA sites, spam sites with stolen/scraped content from my site ranked better than my sites was with the original content. A couple of weeks back I lost 50% of my visitors overnight and then yeasterday I lost another 45% so now I am back to the year 2000 when the sites was kinda new. I have regained some visitors from Yahoo and MSN which is kinda strange since they never used to show up before so it seems that all of them are doing upgrades so I'll probably loose visitors to my other sites that only has MSN sending me traffic.... All of this sucks big time and there is nothing we can do but sit around and wait until it is all over, if ever. I am wondering how many of us changed a lot (SEO) on our sites after Big Daddy and Matt's lies about what we could do and couldn't do. Would be interesting to know how many of us scrwed up our own sites just because of that. I did not change a lot but a little, because that was the thing to do. Don't link here, don't link there, don't do this and don't do that or else you are a bad boy and you can't play with us anymore in our sandbox...... Now we probably have to close our business if the traffic doesn't pick up within a couple of days and doing business online for 6 years will be just a memory.
I am experiencing the same thing as you are. I was even relying on google for my wedding this summer and afterwards. my income dropped 60% today. This sucks big time !!
If the site is 6 years old, then you should have a ton of backlinks. Any webmaster that relies, such as you say you do, on pure search engine traffic is not doing a good job. Promote the site! Use directories, ezines, buy links, etc etc
Just ordinary pages with unique content with ads from breeders. The site kept growing and some put links back to my site, Alexa has 112 links in and the ranking in Alexa is around 340,000. With good coontent, no spamming of any kind would be enough to get traffic and you shouldn't be penalized for not doing it and who knows what will happen in the future. What is right to do today, is probably wrong tomorrow because everyone does it and does it too good for Google to like it. Wonder if all big sites like Apple, Microsoft and Adobe has been hit too or it is just small guys like us here at this forums and any other forum.
I think a good portion of people on this forum are in the same boat whether or not they'll admit it or whether or not it's fully hit them yet. Things have changed so much, when's the last time you saw someone say "pr update!". It's been a while, people are now more concerned about what's really important: traffic, or lack there of. You have two choices though. You can either keep working and looking for new sources of traffic while waiting it out or give up. I think it's still too early to give up.
Im sorry to say if you count on Google this was bound to happen one day or another. Google as a SE and a company is not stable and never was/will be IMHO. You should never count on one single source of revenue for a business, things always change some time in the future if you are not diversified you will get burned. -To answer your question about Apple and Adobe, no they will always rank well, they are local to Google and all the CEO's are actually on good terms. -Microsoft on the other hand I doubt gets much traffic from Google.
It is threads like this that scare the heck out of me. I am still working on getting better rankings in google, so right now they only make up a very small portion of my traffic. But, I am always trying to build up links wherever I can so that once I do start receiving more traffic from google, I, hopefully, will not have to count on that as the sole source of traffic for my site. Because anything can happen. Sorry to hear this has happened to you and I hope you are able to regain your traffic and continue with your online business that you apparently worked so hard to build. However, it is posts such as this one, that remind me not to put all my eggs in one basket as far as google or any other source of traffic, is concerned. Diversify. This past week yahoo, who previously was giving me awesome rankings, decided to drop me out of the serps totally for no reason that I can see. They weren't sending me tons of traffic, but I am still hoping to regain my positions. So, I see, how quickly these things can happen. Best of luck to you.
Another thing is build the sites for the users, of cousre keep in mind the seo part but if you build quailty content people will tell each other and come back, its not always about the serps
If you rely a lot on organic traffic from search engines then you are bound to rely heavily on google. You have no choice. They say google has half of the market share, from my experience it is 90% !!
If you are just doing business online then you need traffic from the Big 3s. My site had most of the visitors from Google and almost none from MSN and Yahoo. A big problem, as far I can understand, is that if you optimize for Google you won't get anything from MSN and if you optimize for MSN you won't get any traffic from Google. My thinking was since I was quite happy with what I had I was just adding pages and some more stuff people would be interested in and trying to get more advertisers but now when I don't get any traffic at all from Google then the advertisers dry out and we'll be gone. Like I said, for some reason I started getting traffic from MSN and Yahoo but nothing that replaces the traffic from Google, so right now it sucks big time! It's "only" been 2 days but it doesn't look good but still hoping to get my traffic back from Google but who knows.....
my website traffic is 90% from google. Now every just drop and drop. Now the traffic is about the same as yahoo which is about only 10%!! ;(
I am also having the same issue. I was getting good traffic from Google but now I get only 10% traffic from google what I had been getting earlier. Surprisingly, I have started getting good traffic from Yahoo! It is 10 times higher what I had been getting earlier.
this will be a good thread to follow. my sites are pretty small compared to those mentioned here, but i still see a drop from google searches
It's interesting that people have seen an increase in Yahoo and MSN referrals. It's as though people are searching Google, not finding what they want, and checking out the other engines. I wonder how much that is happening? Google is getting gamed big time, and there are very few things they can do about it. Every time they change the algo to penalise search engine spam, there is collateral damage to ordinary websites. That was the biggest problem with BigDaddy, throwing the baby out with the bathwater.
If anything i have seen a marginal increase in Google well saying that from day to day it fluctuates, however MSN and Yahoo seem to have totally discounted me.
I get half of my traffic from Google, but 20% of those are searches for my specific brand name. The rest of the traffic is from favorites and affiliates, just 5% from Yahoo, and none from MSN.
Links and SEO will prevail in the end. I don't think Google will STAY this messed up. I think MOST people, who have sites with relevant, original, useful content, plus a good design and backlinks will regain their lost positions in Google before long. I am in total agreement with iowadawg; you must promote your site EVERYWHERE. If you rank with G and not Y!, use Y! PPC, and vice versa. You have to utilize online marketing (paid marketing / PPC ads) if your main source of income is from the Internet. Only online businesses as "extra income" can afford to let organic search results determine their fate. You have to spend money to make money. That's my theory anyway... Good luck to you anyway.
if I do a site search for my site and try to view the cached pages that either isn't there ur they are from August last year (retrieved on Aug 14, 2005 20:58:40 GMT.) They all seem to be supplemental so WTH are all my pages? New pages? Where di they go? Is it just me or someone else out there having the same problem?