Traffic is strange
I haven’t posted on ChillyCool in weeks, yet stats and feedreader subscriptions are up. Glad someone’s enjoying is…? I have no idea why that site does as well as it does (which is not well at all, I’m just saying it should be even worse).
I haven’t been posting as regularly as I like on Project Mai Tai because moving to a new apartment consumed my life for a few weeks there. But it got a huge, helpful inbound that’s given it a fantastic boost in traffic. This is super awesome, because that’s one of the sites I really hope to make it big with someday.
And Project B-2 Bomber is finally feeling the sting from changing domain names (.info to .com). At first, all my PR transferred and all my traffic kept coming so I thought, “Wow, cool!” Then suddenly the traffic got sliced in about half, and I slowly realized as I watched the numbers come in what had happened: Google zeroed PR everywhere but on the front page, and is sending maybe a quarter the traffic it used to. That was frustrating, but I knew it would be okay – I might have a penalty coming from the .info (if there really is such a thing, as has been speculated recently), this might be a normal hiccup in moving a domain name, etc. The bottom line was, everything is still as it was when Google loved me; they’ll be back.
Then I found out something very interesting.
I got an inbound from someone who sent me several hundred new readers over a few days. This bounced my traffic up by about a fifth of what I’d lost. This confirms that my site has a good variety of inbounds and isn’t really dependent on any one search engine or source of traffic.
It’s so nice to be able to look at a major Google letdown and think, “Eh. They’ll be back. Meanwhile – oh, look at all the other who showed up! Hi, guys!” and forget all about them.
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Pretty much all of my main earners are totally dependant on Google. Sort of scary to put all my eggs in one basket, especially that basket! I find that Google traffic converts better than referral traffic though so I concentrate on ranking well rather than swapping links. I know that inbound links are important for ranking well with Google but somehow I do ok having never put much effort into this.
Traffic is a frustrating thing to keep an eye on all the time. I try not to pay too much attention to it anymore because it baffles me!