MayDay: has your traffic from G. dropped or increased after the last Google updates?

With the last MayDay-related Google updates affected most of the sites' rankings (independently of how large and old are they), it is interesting to find out how the changes in Google influenced your sites' traffic and why.
See the poll.

If your traffic amount changed, please give your thoughts on possible reasons for this.

 

My traffic has dropped afetr last Google update.

 

Mine has increased. I am ranking for more keywords now. I think that's the main reason.

 

Mine has stayed about the same, for the most part or so it seems anyway.

 

It is dropped for me.

 

I have actually seen some increase on a few of my sites and a larger majority of traffic coming from search engines

 

Guys, so far I can see very even distribution. 1-1-1-1-1.
Some more feedbacks are needed.

My ultimate idea with this poll was to understand how MayDay affected those sites that were SEO promoted.
So, the kind of conclusions we could draw from this poll are: Mayday worked against (for) SEO, since majority here said 'Dropped' ('Increased').

 

Mine has increased a bit.

 

Even my traffic was dropped

 

Same old here and no big boom like I may expected anyway. However, sometimes I found a lot traffics increased to my inner pages more than my homepage. This should be an advantage for regularly content updated website.

 

And also due to you ranking for long tail keyword.

 

dropped and also i lost about 60% of my indexed pages...dont know if that was supposed to happen.

 

I cant see any significant increase or drop.
Based on the poll result, it seems normal change

 

Just logged into Analytics for the first time in awhile. All 15 of my sites are reporting a 10-25% decrease. However, they still seem to have the same keyword SERPs..maybe it just is seasonal traffic.

 

Increased because my site ranks higher than it did before.

 

In the last 2 years I have seen more and more manual intervention by Google for top brands. Companies from the top 500 brands worldwide, with very search engine unfriendly websites are getting more and more SERPs. It's sad that new media is turning into old media. So it is not strange that other sites see a decrease in traffic.

 

Search Engines came first, search engine optimisation later. The primary objective of search engines is to provide most relevant results to the user, not the best optimised web sites. Given that the websites of the top 500 brands tend to have better content and/or more relevant pages relative to a user's search, it is hardly a surprise that they rank higher.

 

My big site dropped a ton. Traffic down nearly 70% since March. My sites that had alot of content and focus on specific parts of a niche, no change or 10-20% increase. What I learned.

1. Authority isn't what it use to be. You need links to inner pages.
2. Content is second to links now. I think it always was that way, but I notice it even more now. I have some absolutely great content that is tons better than the top 30 pages, but I can't seem to crack the top 30 for those. My mediocre content that has some quality links always come in top 10.
3. Big G loves contextual internal linking. That has helped.
4. Long tail keywords go to relevant sites only.
5. I can see where my content sucked and it gets no traffic anymore. Enhance that content, traffic comes back.
6. If you link out, it better be to a good site.


Even though this definitely improved the quality of the searches to my sites, I personal don't use google to search anymore. I don't know what the black hats are doing or if new algorithm has a bug, but I get 1-2 complete spam sites in the top 20 every time I search for anything on G. 1 in 20 searches resulted in drive-by download sites. I switched to Bing.

 

pjman, great analysis! I really enjoyed reading your thoughts on experience.
The most of your conclusions coincide with mine, except for #2. Content is not the king, as some stereotypic guys write, but it is still important on pretty the same level as links.

DP people, please share your thoughts in the way pjman did. Together we can crack the new algo, and use this knowledge against it

 

Hi George,

I'm with you man. This new algo really is a tougher cookie, than anything I have seen.

According to Matt Cutts, you right on content being king. But with the new sites I'm seeing at the top, I'm not sure I agree. There is a alot of crap that floated to the top on this new algo. I'm going to focus on one single term and totally optimize a non-competitive keyword and see if that is true.

I have to say, I think google is seeing recent link volume dictate who is the authority these days. I have seen some PR 7 sites with some quality stuff that ranked 1-2 take a huge dive. When I look at their backlink volume, it slowed down in recent years.

One I forgot. I think Social Bookmarks are being looked at big time. For some terms the stumbledupon rankings (number of bookmarks) is dead even with the google ranks. Google better buy stumbledupon, because it looks like they are copying them. Pretty soon forget trying to buy a blog link, you will be contacting these big bookmarkers for a link. But, it's virtual impossible to contact them.