Apparently traffic has been weird this year. Having talked to a number of major sponsors they all say traffic is down across the board - for blogs, for tubes, etc. None of the different traffic sources are doing all that well.
When I looked at my stats I freaked out a bit - my new referrals from Google were WAY down from where they were a year ago or so. I would usually post graphs to illustrate my point, but I’m not sure they’d be all that useful since at the time of things going down I was seriously neglecting my sites due to problems with our contractor that could have caused us to go bankrupt.
Anyway, I have access to another big affiliates Google Analytics and when I looked his big site I saw new referrals from Google going down too. When I talked to him that was partly explained by mobile traffic being directed elsewhere, but that didn’t explain everything. But in his case sales had stayed steady despite a drop in traffic.
Out of all that I have a theory… Google’s personalized search has incrementally kicked in and now they’re directing fewer customers to porn sites. Now the people who come to your site are more likely to want to be there. Take the term “bareback” - could be horses, straight sex or gay sex (or even tranny sex). Back in the day Google mixed it all together and hoped the person would find what they were looking for. Now they know the person likes horses or gay sex, or straight sex (based on their past search history), so more of the results will match what the person is really looking for. A better match means fewer bad hits.
They even go as far as saying “this person seems to like rawTOP’s sites (they spend a lot of time on them when they visit them), so let’s rank rawTOP higher in the search results”. That’s sorta what I’ve seen over the past year - the sites that were part of an established brand (like rawTOP) faired much better than the ones that were standalone sites.
So, are you guys seeing anything that would prove or disprove my theories? Is your income steady while your traffic from Google has gone down? Any thoughts?
Re: Anyone Else Seeing Google Send Less Traffic But Higher Quality Traffic?
So I am not quite sure I am following your theory RT. Are you suggesting that because of the Personal Search, it is resulting in less random people finding our sites, and that instead it is actually directing those who seriously are looking for porn, to porn sites?
I think I got that right, and while I don’t follow it as deeply as you do, I’d say that it would seem to be a reasonable theory/assumption. I am also noticing longer stays, more people searching through older posts, which would support the notion that they were originally looking for porn, not ‘horses’ as your analogy put it.
Re: Anyone Else Seeing Google Send Less Traffic But Higher Quality Traffic?
You know I agree with you as we’ve discussed this already together.
To me it’s a bit freighting. I’ve seen a small and steady decline in overall visitors to my own sites. On a day to day basis it’s not very noticeable but once you start looking over a 12 month period it’s pretty clear to see. It’s almost worse than the really big dips I’ve experienced through the years working with Google, those have mainly been down to my own mistakes and been possible to rectify eventually.
And as you mentioned as well, despite a decline in traffic my sales have been very strong for a majority of the year (slowed down a bit now in Oct though). I would have expected the opposite. Normally less traffic means less sales. But that’s not happening at the moment.
I’m certain what we’re experiencing is Google filtering traffic better and control the flow of visitors much more now than ever before. But it’s also likely to be an accumulation of several factors:
Personalized Search
Major clean-up of search Indexes
Changes to Indexing Algorithms (putting more value at certain things)
Changes to how the search boxes work (suggestive search etc)
Heavy filtering of traffic (i.e. possibly putting penalties on certain types of sites like porn sites, they already did this with Google PR)
SEO no longer effective or makes very little difference (possibly Google putting more value on off-site factors)
Long tail traffic is no longer available, where you could get traffic by having a large amount of pages with different keywords
Almost refining each site to it's essence, not allowing sites to score high on lots of different keywords/themes/subjects
Maybe they limit how much traffic each site gets, sharing it out between sites? (no facts to support that)
If you then look at all those factors it actually seems to make for a better more useful search. And really, if I compare Google today with several years ago I would say it’s far better now. Unfortunately a better search seems to have had a negative impact on porn sites.
For me this means I have to start thinking of ways to generate traffic by other means than Google.
Maybe, in a way going back to the days before Google so completely dominated the market. In the past, we had to get traffic through all kinds of little schemes. We had banner exchanges top lists, traffic trading, AVS, link lists, submitting our sites to Yahoo, Excite etc. Unfortunately a lot of those alternative ways of traffic are no longer available. Maybe we will see return of a smaller but thriving alternative sub-internet where people find your site though other means than Google. I’m really not sure why all those other means of getting traffic disappeared, but I think it might be because the sites at the top of the food chain relied heavily on Google. However I think a revival of alternative ways of traffic is wishful thinking on my behalf.
I don’t think there is any doubt. The days of massive Google traffic is gone, it’s now time to figure out how to survive without it.
Re: Anyone Else Seeing Google Send Less Traffic But Higher Quality Traffic?
You might be missing my core point… What we’re not getting anymore is the people who would never have bought what we were selling in the first place. I’m saying that it’s a matter of “good riddance”. Why would I want a person on my site who wants to ride a horse without a saddle?
But it’s even more important these days to have a strong brand. Authority is still really important.
And as far as finding alternate traffic sources - I’m thinking i need to get traffic to go to my other sites… I don’t do enough cross-linking between my sites.
Re: Anyone Else Seeing Google Send Less Traffic But Higher Quality Traffic?
[QUOTE=rawTOP;122833]You might be missing my core point… What we’re not getting anymore is the people who would never have bought what we were selling in the first place. I’m saying that it’s a matter of “good riddance”. Why would I want a person on my site who wants to ride a horse without a saddle?
But it’s even more important these days to have a strong brand. Authority is still really important.
And as far as finding alternate traffic sources - I’m thinking i need to get traffic to go to my other sites… I don’t do enough cross-linking between my sites.[/QUOTE]
You mean Google filters traffic more effectively but that it’s not necessarily a bad thing?
Sure, but why the steady decline over a longer time? Would there not be a dip (indicating the loss of irrelevant traffic) followed by a small steady increase as you build up more bookmarkers? Or would that be attributed to a continuous improvement to the filters or new changes being implemented?
Yes, bounce rates and returning visitors have increased, but only by a very small amount:
Oct 2011:
Bounce Rate: 52%
Returning Visitor: 37.4%
Oct 2012:
Bounce Rate: 48%
Returning Visitor: 38.5%