Dramatic ups and downs in traffic

Any body have regular dramatic ups and downs in their traffic from Google with the downs usually lasting less than a month, sometimes just for days before reaching peak traffic levels?

 

im probably sure everyone experiences ups and downs here and there with their traffic

 

The only thing stable with Google serps is the instability.

 

With this question, I was looking deeper than a perspective that the search engines go up and down and that is natural.

I am looking for anybody who has made technical adjustments that maybe had split their page rank or something like that.

Canoninical issues, ups and downs based on feedback from google stats and webmaster central feedback, stuff like that....

 

If you build enough high quality backlinks your position in the serps will
stabilize as your site ages, most older sites with high quality backlinks do
not move around as much in the serps as the newer sites.

 

There's even few cases that someone is getting steady positions for a long time.

 

How old is your site?

For new sites, such ups and downs is normal. In order to get a stable position in SERPs, you need to get some quality backlinks.

 

If rankings jumps up and down you need few strong links to your site.

 

6 years and it is a complex site with multiple domains and diverse content so there are likely a lot of ways to shoot one's self in the foot, as they say in America.

I am looking in general for technical methods that might cause a website to drop and then go up and then go down, not penalties for this or that but technical concepts that could sink you when applied.

An example that I have read about is canonical problemswhere the www version of a domain splits page rank with the non-www version of the domain.

Another example might be that maybe some threshold is set in the errors presented in google analytics and once an error classification is addressed and the list in analytics goes down, then the traffic goes back up.

Or maybe traffic drops a week after every time your hosting company screws you over and shuts you down for maintenance for 4 hours unexpectedly or something like that.

Or maybe invalid links were detected after a traffic drop and then when the masses of links that were invalid (maybe there were hundreds due to the power of a dynamicly generated page going haywire - I've done that one before).

I am sure the search engines have alarms that go off in certain situations that might indicate spam as a possibility (maybe all of a suddent they detect hundreds of invalid links on your site - that would get the bot's attention).

So has anybody hit any funny sityuations like this where maybe they hit an alarm so to speak and then their traffic drops ad then comes back shortly after (4 days to 4 weeks).

That is what I was talking about.

JJ

 

Hi ... if, by canonical, you mean you're hoping a simple mathematical rule is at fault, in your situation, you're misleading yourself. All the great advice, in the thread, points to the same general and safe assumption : google is neither simple nor rule bound. Although google, at least, implicitly, presents as stable and relatively predictable, nothing is farther from the truth. Heed the advice, from others, in the thread, and find patience. I know this wasn't much help, but thought I'd pass on a lesson I learned the hard way: patience. Good luck.

 

As someone said elsewhere. The only thing that is reliable to Google SERPS is their unreliability

 

With all due respect, the main advice you have here is patience?

Surely I could take some action on my sites that would reduce my traffic, of course. I know how to do that.

I can reverse those actions to go back up.

So of course there are technical things that can cause traffic ups and downs and not just Google deciding it is high tide.

I appreciate all the "be patient" stuff and understand the idea that sometimes it is wise to be patient, but I am looking for some technical things away from the average "use keywords in headers" stuff.

So I will start and maybe someone else can add to this and please don't tell me to patient. I am losing my patience. j/k - just a bad day - be easy on me!

I have done things to my sites many times that have sunk me in different ways.

How about this theory?

I think that the more responses to page calls and page definitions in webmaster central that a site has, the more likely that Google will drop you down the traffic list. SO if I am getting lots of 404s and short title messages and stuff like that, my traffic might take a deep dive until I hit some lower "mathematical" threshhold.

Also, who doesn't think that math is involved in the Google algo? I'm pretty sure they have some top mathematicians on their team.

Sorry if I sound terse, just letting it flow after a very long and tough day in the office so forgive me.

ps My traffic on one domain just tripled in recent days after I cleaned up some things in the webmaster central. I do not know if they are related or not but can only theorize, of course. The lower traffic level caused me to post here. I hope it does not drop again but I will try to keep the webmaster central cleaned up and let you know how it goes.

Sure, possibly the drop is due to some type of penalty or manual review process to occur maybe but I have given up on that theory because the drops and increases that I am talking about are very mechanical in nature and not algorythmic in nature.

Thanks for the interaction, I appreciate it. This place is really cool, even if anybody blasts me (anybody can have a bad day).

J