Bjorn’s posts about his problems with Google got me to think about how dependent I am on Google. It’s the bulk of my traffic. On my condom/solo site it’s over 80% of my traffic.
Here are my numbers - the first is the percentage of overall traffic, the second is the percentage of new visits.
rawTOP.com - 71% / 76%
Wily Willy - 82% / 82%
All my sites combined - 68% / 73%
The numbers are actually higher than shown there for two reasons. First, Google Analytics doesn’t count Google Images traffic properly (the visit doesn’t get counted until the user clicks to remove the frameset). And a fair amount of my referral traffic is sending traffic between my sites - so the original source of that traffic is still usually Google.
On top of that I’ve attached a few graphs and if you look at them you’ll see most of the growth in my traffic has come from Google. That means the percentages are getting higher and higher because my Google traffic is growing faster than other sources.
I love Google, but it’s sorta scary to think 80-90% of the traffic on some of my sites is reliant on Google… Luckily, so far I haven’t been affected negatively by their algorithm changes, but some day one of the changes is going to hit me and it’s going to hurt…
I started up a forum site recently. I know the traffic on forums doesn’t convert as well as other types of traffic, but at least it gives me some diversity… Now I need to think of other ways to continue to diversify…
How reliant are you on Google? Anyone else want to share their percentages?
Other search engines, bookmarkers, niche directories and link lists…
I also often feel too dependant on Google. But I’ve noticed in the past year (due to my issues) that that the majority of Google traffic is low quality and does not actually benefit your site very much. Rough guess is that 60-70% of all Google traffic isn’t very productive. Not sure why, but I would guess that people click to visit sites listed on Google rather than reading the titles or descriptions, only to find / feel that the site that comes up isn’t what they are looking for. Or maybe meta titles + descriptions don’t match their expectations.
The most important surfers are your bookmarkers. Without loyal visitors and fans of GayDemon I wouldn’t survive the ups and downs of Google Madness. But these type of surfers takes a VERY long time to build up. It’s taken me nearly 10 years to build up a good level of loyal surfers.
The only advice I would give is pretty much what Google webmaster guidelines says. Create high quality unique content. Build sites for your visitors, not search engines or bots.
REALLY??? I find just the opposite… Google Organic is some of my best traffic. See the graph below. It shows the percentage of visitors that click through to sponsors and Google Organic is leading the pack with 20% clicking through to a sponsor. Yes, Google Images doesn’t perform very well, but I’ve always heard image search traffic doesn’t convert at all, so I’m happy even with 12 1/2% clicking through to a sponsor.
I think the difference is that your blog or site could be considered a destination in itself, GayDemon and most of my sites are just stop-overs, places used to find things. So when someone searches for “bareback” on Google, finds and visits GayDemon Bareback Links they might not fancy browsing yet again.
But that’s always going to be the problem with affiliate sites and why blogs are the best tool for affilaites to use. Blogs can be entertaining and should be able to build bookmarkers easier than a link list… Note, “should”. A lot of affiliate blogs are just copy and paste posts which wouldn’t get any bookmarkers.
At times when I’m low on Google traffic, but my bounce rates go down. When I’m high on Google traffic, bounce rates go up.
[QUOTE=gaydemon;70470]I think the difference is that your blog or site could be considered a destination in itself, GayDemon and most of my sites are just stop-overs, places used to find things. So when someone searches for “bareback” on Google, finds and visits GayDemon Bareback Links they might not fancy browsing yet again.
At times when I’m low on Google traffic, but my bounce rates go down. When I’m high on Google traffic, bounce rates go up.[/QUOTE]
Not sure I agree with you. My goal is to get my visitors off my site and off to sponsor tours. I want a high bounce rate. (Actually, because I track outbound clicks as page views they aren’t bounces, but in the context of your comments they’d be considered bounces…) The site is just an interim destination - sort of an edited list they check to see what’s hot and interesting. That’s essentially the same goal/purpose as Gay Demon.
Do you track outbound clicks in Google Analytics? I think it would help if you don’t, but you have to build your links differently…
[QUOTE=rawTOP;70474]Not sure I agree with you. My goal is to get my visitors off my site and off to sponsor tours. I want a high bounce rate. (Actually, because I track outbound clicks as page views they aren’t bounces, but in the context of your comments they’d be considered bounces…) The site is just an interim destination - sort of an edited list they check to see what’s hot and interesting. That’s essentially the same goal/purpose as Gay Demon.
Do you track outbound clicks in Google Analytics? I think it would help if you don’t, but you have to build your links differently…[/QUOTE]
No, don’t track clicks through Google. I track it through my own script instead.
The difference though is that if someone searches for “bareback” on Google and clicks… If they end up on a page with just a link listing (gaydemon) or if they end up on a blog post with Bareback images / content… (your blog) they woud probably be more happy with the blog post. Both are affiliate sites, but one has more of interest to surfer than the other.
I don’t think you’re necessarily doing something wrong. We’re affiliates so our job is to gather traffic and send it to you. It’s quite difficult for a paysite to get lots of Google traffic, simply because you need to build up non-affiliate incoming links. Plus the words you would compete for on Google would probably be very difficult to score high on.
I’m an affiliate also, but my approach to the blogs is closer to how I ran paysites for years so maybe this explains this for two of the larger ones I maintain:
Google of course is tops, 5.6-6.5% total and pretty much flattens all other SE traffic. This pattern does however suggest link popularity isn’t as SEO important as before. All blogs are sitemapped for the major SEs.
It’s not a secret. You will be extremely dependent on Google, that is, as long as you depend on search engines for your website traffic.
How are websites moving out of this box? This is the entire point of social media.
Since attending South By Southwest Interactive, all of my projects with my current crop of websites has been to push them into the realm of social media. That’s going to be the future of how you get readers.
I’d say that a very successful example of someone using social media to generate traffic would be JustUsBoys, because it’s their message forum community that brings people back to their site.
Twitter is a social media tool, there’s lots of others. Looking at the vastly different ways gay adult businesses have adopted Twitter is very interesting. Some are really adroit, others not so much. Twitter is one of many examples. In short, there’s never any time to sleep due to all of the change that happens on the internet. whew!
Anyways, I think social media is going to be the reigning change element over the next couple of years, and not strictly having your static page site show up at the top of static Google search results.
Steve
PS: Why does having a high rank in Yahoo mean so little now? Compare the search engines. Yahoo now presents consistently the ugliest pages of results compared to anyone. That’s why. Sad but true.
Just to give apples-to-apples comparison to what Bjorn posted, here are my top sources of traffic for rawtop.com and my condom site wilywilly.com (the second one with rawtop for a referrer is wily willy).
Google organic is about the same as Gay Demon, but then things diverge somewhat. Bjorn - 4 of your top 5 traffic sources are organic. With me it’s 2 of 5, BUT the referral traffic that’s showing up is Google Images, which I’d argue is organic traffic even if Google Analytics doesn’t think so. Looking at it another way 2 of my top 3 traffic sources are Google, compared to 1 of the top 5 for Gay Demon - so I’m more dependent on Google, but at least it’s not all from one Google service.
