Lost US traffic

One of my sites have been jumping up and down since the Google updates mid Jan and a 25% loss of image traffic after Google decided stealing images was the way to go for their new Image Search.

Traffic was just starting to recover and earnings going up. 85-95% of the traffic was coming in from the US. Then about 10 days ago one of the largest newspapers in Holland decided to link to the site. First on their homepage and then as the article was pushed off there after a couple of days, just from the section and article page.

The traffic impact was obviously great ? and we celebrated wildly with an extra spoon of sugar in our tea. The traffic from Holland for the first few days were around 65-85% of our visits, and then it slowly dropped obviously.

And then the hang-over started: When the Dutch circus was over; we noticed that we had lost nearly all our US traffic. Traffic from Holland is now negligible, but still our US traffic accounts for only 15-25% of the total ? resulting in a huge loss of visits. Our Alexa rank in the US dropped from around 8000 to 650 000!

WTF is going on? Is there a chance that Google suddenly decided, based on the fact that for a period nearly all our traffic was from Holland, that we were only relevant for the Dutch market? And thus pushing us way down on US searches?

Has anyone seen anything similar?

I've noticed that one day I have 150 UVS on my best KW and 2 days later zero, and so on...I am not getting upset over that anymore, nothing special I can do about it, I will just continue posting more articles targeting long KW's and that's it. Also, I decided to continue with my no link building strategy (actuly 2-3 new links in 50-60 days is my "goal").
And, I don't know if it's just me but I noticed that this new Google image search is back to old, so now when I click image I go straight to the site where the image is posted

Some site ranks for Google U.S, U.K and others without any loss in ranking. I don't think your drop in ranking is caused by your sudden traffic from holland site, Google is too smart for that type of sh**t.

And, I don't know if it's just me but I noticed that this new Google image search is back to old, so now when I click image I go straight to the site where the image is posted

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Over the last week I've heard several people saying that - but mine is the new one regardless of whether I'm logged into google or not.

I think what happened to Google around Jan 17 was that all their servers burned down and they hadn't made any backups. So now they just have 798 million monkeys sitting there, randomly selecting search results, trying to keep things going until they can rewrite the search algo and start crawling the web again.

bigbong said:

One of my sites have been jumping up and down since the Google updates mid Jan and a 25% loss of image traffic after Google decided stealing images was the way to go for their new Image Search.

Traffic was just starting to recover and earnings going up. 85-95% of the traffic was coming in from the US. Then about 10 days ago one of the largest newspapers in Holland decided to link to the site. First on their homepage and then as the article was pushed off there after a couple of days, just from the section and article page.

The traffic impact was obviously great - and we celebrated wildly with an extra spoon of sugar in our tea. The traffic from Holland for the first few days were around 65-85% of our visits, and then it slowly dropped obviously.

And then the hang-over started: When the Dutch circus was over; we noticed that we had lost nearly all our US traffic. Traffic from Holland is now negligible, but still our US traffic accounts for only 15-25% of the total - resulting in a huge loss of visits. Our Alexa rank in the US dropped from around 8000 to 650 000!

WTF is going on? Is there a chance that Google suddenly decided, based on the fact that for a period nearly all our traffic was from Holland, that we were only relevant for the Dutch market? And thus pushing us way down on US searches?

Has anyone seen anything similar?

Click to expand...

WTF is why you're basing that much of your business model on one traffic source. At this point it may be best for you to turn to email, social, PPC, etc as well as finding other referrers in general. Your whole traffic philosophy should be diversified, not just your links.

Tensegrity said:

WTF is why you're basing that much of your business model on one traffic source. At this point it may be best for you to turn to email, social, PPC, etc as well as finding other referrers in general. Your whole traffic philosophy should be diversified, not just your links.

Click to expand...

I'm sorry, I think you posted in the wrong thread - did you have many tabs open in your browser perhaps? I don't base my business model on IM at all. I was asking a question related to how Google identify language relevance under their new algo.

How are you making your money from the site?

Tensegrity said:

How are you making your money from the site?

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Adsense. But it is a hobby project and not important to me at all financially. Doesn't mean I don't get irritated when Google decides that the site apparently is not relevant to the US market, though, when it is in English and hosted in the US.

Currently ranking high in Holland and silly countries like Italy, Hungary etc. For no apparent reason what so ever. A KW (name of a US celebrity) for example: my site is ranked #2 on google.it and google.nl, #3 on google.de and then #36 on google.com. It's a US celebrity, article in English, server hosted in the US. And google decides that it is of particular interest to Italian people. There is nothing on my side to indicate that the site is more relevant to those markets so the only explanation is that Google is using external parameters to consider the site more relevant to those countries. Either traffic, CTR or linking.

Edit: Linking is obviously one of the parameters Google is known to use. But the site has no incoming links from .it sites or sites in Italian and only the newspaper article coming in from .nl.

I am sorry to hear that. Google changes their algorithm all the time and they usually don't give a f.. who ranks - worse than that, I have heard many bloggers suffer it so much that they need to find a real job instead of keep blogging. That is harsh. Anyhow, I hope you will recover from this soon.

Maybe trace back the history of your links from those "silly countries" if you wanna know why you had that discrepancy in the traffic.

Do you use Google Analytics or Web Master Tools?

Tensegrity said:

Maybe trace back the history of your links from those "silly countries" if you wanna know why you had that discrepancy in the traffic.

Do you use Google Analytics or Web Master Tools?

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Both. However the site has no links from anything but .com sites in English, excluding the dutch newspaper link. Nor are there outgoing links from my site to any country specific TLD. Just .com links there too. The site has only a small number of incoming links (less than 150 from external sites according to seomoz) but they are of pretty good quality.

Google puts a big emphasis on traffic sources in its relevancy algorithm, though. So like I said before, maybe focus on other sources for traffic. It's a win/win, you diversify your sources while getting more traffic/money.

Right now, it sounds like your whole business model for the site is based on Google SEO. You really should treat Google traffic as the same as all your other high traffic sources and not put all your eggs in one basket, so to speak. I have tons of sites that *only* get Google image search traffic, but I never even worked on the SEO to those besides installing All in One and setting up permalinks. Trying to deconstruct their image search is just taking time away from other more profitable ways of driving traffic to your site.