Google traffic throttling - again

[wkirk]

I've not seen a thread here yet discussing how and why does G limit the amount of traffic it sends through to a domain.
Or I just don't know the proper keywords to search for.

I'm pretty sure some of you must have experienced this " throttling effect " or "traffic cap".

Site starts out normally - first few months: (0-4k/day)


Then after the Jan 9th update: (4k/day down to exactly 1400/day)


The site was penalized for spammy backlinks, but that's not the point. Getting the exact same number of visitors ( +/- 5% ) each and every day proves there is some kind of artifical " ceiling " of the amount of traffic G sends to the domain. ( subdomains included ).

This is the 3rd site that got hit this way, the first one is stuck at exactly 2k/day for years now. No amount of content / backlink spam seems to affect it. Neither positively nor negatively. - Which is nice for stable passive income but still..

Does anyone have more info on this? Is it possible to escape or just do what I usually do - forget about it and rebuild on a new domain?

 

[ilim72]

That is strange and I think unlikely, but don't know for sure of course. I mean if it is penalty it is easier just move you down in ranking and numbers of visitors will be taken care of naturally instead of throttling traffic.

 

[wkirk]

It's very strange indeed. The above mentioned 2k/day site looks like this: ( graph filtered for G traffic only )



It's been like this for a year or two. Tried adding content, blasting with links, removing content(!) ... nope. G sends 2k/day and that's it. When adding or removing content the keywords change - obviously, but the traffic stays the same.

I have a few sites " stuck " like this at seemingly random levels, however on the good side.. traffic is stable and predictable which is nice these days I guess.

Anyone else experiencing this?

 

[wkirk]

*shameless bump

 

[islandman1010]

I don't understand what you mean with throttling traffic. Google cannot control what people click on in the search listing. All they can do is change your position or choose when to show or when not. Please explain how you think G can throttle your traffic?

 

[wkirk]

I really have no idea why and how would they accomplish this. It really makes no sense at all. However stats show otherwise. Why on earth do I get the exact same number of visitors from G after getting penalized? I'm seeing the exact same pattern on several sites. Am I the only one experiencing this? If it's not G throttling then what else could be the reason? I really have no idea what is this.

 

[DamageX]

You're saying the site was penalized, does that mean it lost rankings? If so, there's your answer.

 

[MosesW]

It is hard to say that Google throttles traffic to any website, because Google may change your ranking but can not force users to click or not click to your website links in SERPs.
But your web hosting provider can throttle traffic to your website, somehow.
I am curious too about the exact reason here.

 

[wkirk]

The only reason I think that the site was penalized is just based on the fact that this 'throttling' started on 9th January. There was a minor update that day. My hosting provider does not limit my sites because I am the hosting provider We can rule out this being the bottleneck. On my phone now but I will post some more detailed stats about the sites having this issue along with server load graphs so we can rule out hosting problems.btw searching for 'google traffic throttling' or 'google traffic cap' will return quite a few results where people report the same strange flat line in g referrals.

 

[WrightWilliams]

Either you got penalized and now thats the exact number of people finding your site each day, or you're receiving a healthy stream of fake traffic someone is blasting at your site. Google does not throttle traffic to domains.

 

[WrightWilliams]

Additionally you could be tracking traffic wrong/your server may be tracking traffic wrong. That is about it.

 

[tony_d]

I'm sorry OP, I laughed out loud when I read the OP. Have you possibly convinced yourself of certain limiting factors?

If you rank, you get the traffic. If you don't rank, you don't get the traffic. It's a very simple binary equation.

 

[wkirk]

I'm sorry OP, I laughed out loud when I read the OP. Have you possibly convinced yourself of certain limiting factors?

If you rank, you get the traffic. If you don't rank, you don't get the traffic. It's a very simple binary equation.

I'm glad you're having a good time





Well i'm not convinced at all about this "throttling" effect - just made that up because i have no better word for it - but I can't be the only one experiencing this...
If you do a search for 'google traffic throttle' you'll find several threads over at .. well another forum, but no helpful replies just theories.

Since I have 3 sites affected by this i'm starting to get a little curious what's going on here ...
I've checked the stats against the apache log files and they match 90% so it's ok.
Also the server has plenty of resources / bandwidth available, so it's not a performance issue. It's proven by the fact that a reddit posts generates sh*t ton of traffic in a sudden burst and the server handles it without any issues.

All comments/opinions are welcome... thanks for all the replies so far!

 

[islandman1010]

Im not sure what you are trying to show here. I can show plenty of graphs the same as that. And if I added a ranking position graph over the top it would more or less show what happened and when. You are just guessing at this using one set of stats ie just traffic. Overlay a daily ranking position in the serps then you might make a true picture of this.

 

[wkirk]

Well.. that's true I'm only guessing based on traffic coming from G nothing else.
I will keep an eye on the rankings throughout the day for a while.

Could you please show me a similar almost flat line graph?
I still find this really weird.

 

[StraussCan]

Dafuq did I just read. You are penalised man and u can;t control user behaviour after all. They clikc what the fuck they want to.