It's holiday season and my Christmas traffic dramatically dropped last week. It seems that the drop happened around the 17th December, which is the day Google manipulated one of their algorithms. At the same time, Squidoo seems to be playing with our lenses as well.
Strangely, it is always during the holiday season that Squidoo and Google make a decision on badly hitting lens- and webmasters. As, unfortunately on the 17th this month my Christmas site that's updated every day with unique content was hit as well - all other sites also, though but their traffic doesn't hurt as badly as it hurts the Christmas related one.
Even more strangely nobody seems to want to talk about it or even didn't notice that their lenses and site traffic had dropped. Or am I the only one webmaster in the world whose traffic got hit so bad? I'm pretty sure this is not the case since some other talk about an article relating to Google's latest update (17th December) and Matt Cutt's multiple lies through videos.
Some even benefited from this last update on Google's database. Some saw their sites sinking for good. Good Google, thank you so very much. And with Squidoo playing Google's game the wrong way the situation is even worse.
For example, a lens of mine that used to generate 1,000 visitors/week - and it is a very very very low amount of traffic for my Christmas lenses - dropped to 99 visitors/week since the 17th December. The speed is astounding! I've never seen such a fast drop! Another lens of mine that is extremely popular at Christmas and even all year long dropped by 2/3 of its usual traffic. If things keep going on this way, the traffic to this lens is going to be like in April... long before Christmas.
Another very strange thing happening on my portfolio is a lens that's never been popular at all is seeing its traffic climbing. But this traffic comes from Pinterest, which is, for some topics, a great traffic generator. Unfortunately this traffic, while generating sales, doesn't generate huge commissions from a site of which I don't get many payouts as it's a site that I don't use a lot for affiliate stuff.
Could you believe that an unique Christmas lens that still has NO competitor on Squidoo because based on a topic that is quite unusual, has only 23 visits/week? How can this lens, in this case, generate any kind of sale? Well it got three sales yesterday but it's the first time since the start of the end of year holiday season that this lens makes any sale!
Apart from two or three lenses of which I had to change the introduction as they were stolen by some sites like "www dot besthomever dot com" and "www dot bharatmoms dot com", I haven't touched my Christmas lenses in any other way than updating products. So this huge drop can't be explained by this. Instead and while checking the past 30 days traffic and comparing it with last week's traffic I notice that Squidoo wasn't just kicked out by Google, it also had been hit by Yahoo and Bing as those two sources of traffic dramatically fade away as well! Yahoo and Bing sent my lenses 1/10th of the previous weeks traffic! Are they going to align their search results, database and algorithms on Google's?
Even my craft lenslet that used to get traffic stopped getting any kind of traffic since the 17th December... With zero traffic to product review lenses and now zero traffic to my craft one, I don't see the point building 5 lenses per year to keep my Giant status... That is another thing I'm going to think of these days...
I'm seriously considering deleting my Christmas lenses from my portfolio and moving them to my Christmas site. They would provide me with 50+ blog posts - therefore I'll be able to schedule 50 weeks of fresh content since I'd break them into two parts and would rewrite the whole lot.
If I do this with my Halloween lenses of which traffic wasn't as miserable as the Christmas one but wasn't optimal, I could also fill my Halloween site with 50+ weeks of content. This would leave me with a portfolio of +/- 85 lenses.
I don't know why Squidoo is so hatred by search engines and about to lose all their juice. And because I wanted to make sure about what I saw as traffic trends on Squidoo I checked my site traffic as well. It's harder to make difference between one and another search engine as I noticed a strange trend.
Out from the related holiday period, my sites get traffic almost exclusively from Google but once the related holiday period started, I get a good mix of Google, Yahoo and Bing traffic. So for example Christmas time gets its share of the three search engines though less traffic from Google - since the 17th December as stated earlier.
Other sites still get their share of Google traffic, 10% from other search engines with a huge decrease from Google starting on the 17th December.
Let me know if you experienced such a huge traffic drop - both on Squidoo and other sites.
Posted by Squidoo lensmaster Prosperity66
Strangely, it is always during the holiday season that Squidoo and Google make a decision on badly hitting lens- and webmasters. As, unfortunately on the 17th this month my Christmas site that's updated every day with unique content was hit as well - all other sites also, though but their traffic doesn't hurt as badly as it hurts the Christmas related one.
Even more strangely nobody seems to want to talk about it or even didn't notice that their lenses and site traffic had dropped. Or am I the only one webmaster in the world whose traffic got hit so bad? I'm pretty sure this is not the case since some other talk about an article relating to Google's latest update (17th December) and Matt Cutt's multiple lies through videos.
Some even benefited from this last update on Google's database. Some saw their sites sinking for good. Good Google, thank you so very much. And with Squidoo playing Google's game the wrong way the situation is even worse.
For example, a lens of mine that used to generate 1,000 visitors/week - and it is a very very very low amount of traffic for my Christmas lenses - dropped to 99 visitors/week since the 17th December. The speed is astounding! I've never seen such a fast drop! Another lens of mine that is extremely popular at Christmas and even all year long dropped by 2/3 of its usual traffic. If things keep going on this way, the traffic to this lens is going to be like in April... long before Christmas.
Another very strange thing happening on my portfolio is a lens that's never been popular at all is seeing its traffic climbing. But this traffic comes from Pinterest, which is, for some topics, a great traffic generator. Unfortunately this traffic, while generating sales, doesn't generate huge commissions from a site of which I don't get many payouts as it's a site that I don't use a lot for affiliate stuff.
Could you believe that an unique Christmas lens that still has NO competitor on Squidoo because based on a topic that is quite unusual, has only 23 visits/week? How can this lens, in this case, generate any kind of sale? Well it got three sales yesterday but it's the first time since the start of the end of year holiday season that this lens makes any sale!
Apart from two or three lenses of which I had to change the introduction as they were stolen by some sites like "www dot besthomever dot com" and "www dot bharatmoms dot com", I haven't touched my Christmas lenses in any other way than updating products. So this huge drop can't be explained by this. Instead and while checking the past 30 days traffic and comparing it with last week's traffic I notice that Squidoo wasn't just kicked out by Google, it also had been hit by Yahoo and Bing as those two sources of traffic dramatically fade away as well! Yahoo and Bing sent my lenses 1/10th of the previous weeks traffic! Are they going to align their search results, database and algorithms on Google's?
Even my craft lenslet that used to get traffic stopped getting any kind of traffic since the 17th December... With zero traffic to product review lenses and now zero traffic to my craft one, I don't see the point building 5 lenses per year to keep my Giant status... That is another thing I'm going to think of these days...
I'm seriously considering deleting my Christmas lenses from my portfolio and moving them to my Christmas site. They would provide me with 50+ blog posts - therefore I'll be able to schedule 50 weeks of fresh content since I'd break them into two parts and would rewrite the whole lot.
If I do this with my Halloween lenses of which traffic wasn't as miserable as the Christmas one but wasn't optimal, I could also fill my Halloween site with 50+ weeks of content. This would leave me with a portfolio of +/- 85 lenses.
I don't know why Squidoo is so hatred by search engines and about to lose all their juice. And because I wanted to make sure about what I saw as traffic trends on Squidoo I checked my site traffic as well. It's harder to make difference between one and another search engine as I noticed a strange trend.
Out from the related holiday period, my sites get traffic almost exclusively from Google but once the related holiday period started, I get a good mix of Google, Yahoo and Bing traffic. So for example Christmas time gets its share of the three search engines though less traffic from Google - since the 17th December as stated earlier.
Other sites still get their share of Google traffic, 10% from other search engines with a huge decrease from Google starting on the 17th December.
Let me know if you experienced such a huge traffic drop - both on Squidoo and other sites.
Posted by Squidoo lensmaster Prosperity66
Hi,
ReplyDeleteDid you manage to return your traffic? Also had a huge drop on Dec 17.
Nope, absolutely no increase since then on Squidoo, instead, my Christmas site's traffic is getting to its normal rate...
Delete