SE Conspiracy

I was just searching through my statistics logs on several of my sites tonight, and I discovered something interesting. I noticed that my traffic hasn’t gone down on any of my sites over the past year. In fact, traffic has mostly increased while my Alexa ranks have tanked. Why does that surprise me? It surprises me because my income has tanked along with my Alexa rank and I assumed that my traffic must’ve died. So, what happened?

I have been so busy and involved with developing “Shrink The Web”, “LinkSmile”, and “jAvVy” that I haven’t even bothered keeping up with my traffic versus conversions versus income. Now that I’m done with those projects and analyzing things again, it seems to me that I’m getting as much -if not more- traffic than last year but the conversions are down. Could it be that my newer content is so poor that it no longer converts? Or, is it more likely that the quality of traffic has gone downhill?

To answer that question, I’ve asked for feedback from several fellow webmasters and really pushed them to take a quick look at their stats versus their income. Can you guess what we found? They have several top rankings for some key phrases and those yield less traffic than before (in some cases the same) , yet their income has been declining for years.

Has the struggle for “high rankings” become a quest for fool’s gold?

This income depression seems to affect sales as well as clicks on advertisements (such as Google Ads, Yahoo! Ads, etc). In general, everyone reported the same click-through on advertisements but only 1/3 of the income year over year. It would seem that it is not our content that is failing us; it is the search engines.

Could it actually be possible that the quality (and possibly the amount) of traffic coming through Google, Yahoo, and MSN is really quite a bit less than last year or the year before?

I did notice a direct correlation between my recent increase in advertising and a noticeable increase in conversions. So, I know my direct advertising is working. How then is it that my other traffic seems so worthless?

How’s this for a conspiracy theory: “What if the major search engines are no longer moving the traffic they once were and they are filling the gap with massive parked traffic or bought visitors?”

Would that then explain this low quality of traffic that still floods some of my sites?

Would that explain why I’m seeing conversions as low as when I used to bid for placement in excite, goclick, and looksmart?

Would that help to explain why Google is distracting us all with this PageRank versus traffic versus text links mumbo-jumbo? I’m sure any truth to a massive drop in traffic wouldn’t help their over-inflated stock price …or their ego for that matter.

The site statistics shown below were taken from one of our sites that employed no SEO “techniques” except for on-page optimization (not too much though). We advertised in related spaces to drive traffic and the site also did well from more than 5,000 natural backlinks.

First, let’s paint the picture of the traffic and revenue losses:

1. In 2005, I saw a HUGE dip in traffic across all of my sites. There were no bans and no other reasons to explain the loss in traffic. This site held Top 1 to Top 5 rankings for years.



2. The Google traffic dropped by 79.3% and conversions dropped by 31.8%. The Google traffic did pick back up at one point and surpassed Jan figures but it tanked by November 2005 -appearing to be a complete “de-listing.”

Stats for Jan 2005	Stats for Feb 2005

3. Yahoo and MSN continued to send quality traffic throughout most of the year but when that traffic dropped off in Nov and Dec, I saw a 47.4% decline in overall traffic from the January drop and another 68% decline in revenue! Google traffic nearly ceased altogether and represented 17.8% of the overall traffic lost from Feb to Dec.

Stats for Nov 2005	Stats for Dec 2005

From that period on, a search in the specific niche this website served would return nothing but absolutely spammy, affiliate, or made-for-adsense sites. The results were absolutely useless in this niche until earlier this year!

In mid-2007, this site was re-listed and regained its former top 5 ranking in this niche area. So, how many visitors do you think we get from Google, Yahoo, and MSN?

Let’s take a look at our visitors so far in December (13 full days), shall we?

Now that is a pathetic amount of traffic for having such high rankings. If that weren’t bad enough, the “doubled” traffic (yes, 100% increase from October 2007) has prompted our income to increase only marginally (something like 5%) as a result of our newly re-acquired high rankings for key terms.

So, after reviewing all of this data, two thoughts stand out in my mind:

1. “high rankings” generate a small fraction of pre-2005 rankings, and
2. boosts in visitors are comprised of 95% worthless traffic

This is precisely why I haven’t cared much about PageRank, Rankings, or SEO over the past couple of years. I no longer see the point. Perhaps certain industries still prosper and profit from this traffic but not mine -and my companies serve a wide range of niche markets.

Anyone else feel like search engine optimization isn’t worth the investment in time and money anymore?

The only things that seem to work for me are buying quality advertising on related websites willing to place banners or links in premium locations -whether they be direct links, nofollow, or javascript. Sponsored email campaigns can also be effective and we see some “light” benefit to pay-per-click campaigns in certain niches.

Perhaps link buying and selling has gotten so much attention lately because it is actually hurting search engines more in the pocket than anything. Perhaps visitors are finding sites through links, banners, and social bookmarking sites instead of by searching.

To help shed some light on the 2005 drop -which a couple of my webmaster friends also identified as a critical point, I decided to do some more research. The most relevant articles that might hint to the root of the problem and related closely to today’s issues are:

1. Google “Backlink Update” (Jan 1, 2005)
   http://www.prweaver.com/blog/2005/01/02/81-google-dance-alert
2. Google, Yahoo, and MSN Unite on NoFollow (Jan 18, 2005)
   http://blog.searchenginewatch.com/blog/050118-204728

Anyone else find that interesting?

Would it be safe to assume that this depression of traffic many of us see today has anything at all to do with the big push for rel=nofollow?

All I know is that if my conspiracy theory is true, then Google is doing a fantastic job at distracting webmasters (and therefore investors) from the truth. It also makes me wonder, “Who will have the power position in five (5) years, if all the traffic is dispersing again?”

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One Response to “How’s the QUALITY of your Traffic?”

1. Product of the System » Blog Archive » Ugh… This 4am stuff has got to stop Says:
   December 14th, 2007 at 4:11 am

   [...] just finished a huge post on SE Conspiracy (here) with one of my latest conspiracy theories. It took me over 4 hours to make that post -due to the [...]

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