I can see my SERP moving up in MSN, Yahoo & Google and traffic dropping to 50% from MSN this month, also drop in google & Yahoo traffic by 20% even after SERP moving upwards in both, people staying longer on the web pages, conversions more.
Does someone know why there is a drop in all SE's traffic I got some news letter pointing a drop in searches this month, does anyone here has any clue...

Hi there… and welcome to the boards…. David here.

MSN; it hasn’t been passing referrers since last week. It is ‘apparently’ fixed now; http://forums.site-reference.com/topic/ … referrers/

Season; Across the board (we manage a variety of SEO campaigns across multiple markets) and search traffic does tend to slow down traditionally in the Late August- Early Sept. area.

I don’t know what else to say if your traditional ranking terms (traffic producing referrer terms) have not tanked in any way. Yahoo has done quite a bit of ‘tweaking’ to the algo during the last 2 months or so, but once again if the SERP rankings are fine, then it may just be seasonal. Do you have stats/records from last year at this time?

hey thegyspsy ,
Thanks for your reply.
In the industry my company is into, sept. is the time when traffic improves, last years stats are not available here, I joined when the company had around 70 top quality key terms they were ranking in top 10 combined in google, yahoo & MSN. That is before april. Now we have the numbers touching to 160+, and the sales have increased, quality of leads have improved, everything is far better than the management could ask for. However its just the referrer stats thats falling down for sept. I read a post also in webmasterworld regarding the same today saying what you have mentioned that the problem is fixed.
Everyone is just talking about MSN, and my stats shows a drop in all big 3. So is the referrer tracking issue was there for all 3 to some extent or just pertaining to MSN.
please guide.

Thanks

It sounds like 2 unrelated events. SEO has little to do with sales/conversions outside of delivering targeted traffic. This is the first clue.

April is the second, for Google at least. That is around the time of the Big Daddy update and if your site was tanked in the SERPs then, it would likely slide more on successive updates if measures weren’t take to adapt after BD.

Yahoo also moved to a model somewhat closer to Google’s during various updates through July-August. It is possible there as well.

MSN have been dabbling all year as they worked towards the launch of Live. Anything is possible there. I

It would be difficult to narrow down without more detailed, long term analytics to go over. Between analytics packages and ongoing SERP tracking we would notice drops as they happen and look for factors of the time frame. Looking at the last 9 months in a singular light won’t do much in solving the mystery really.

Sales/Conversions; For this I would look to any changes in the site over that period. From design to technological factors and sales copy, pricing modifications and more. This is also very difficult to do without data to look at.
We use not only site analytics, but PATH TRACKING as well. This gives a great deal of detail that can be disseminated in order to establish what is happening on a given site.

It does highlight the advantages of conversion/analytics applications. It is essential for establishing what is being done RIGHT and what may be wrong with a site.

In the end you may never know, too much time has passed and there is little in the way of data to establish what transpired….  Sorry I can’t say more….

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