Another quarter of 2013 has past and as always I like to share my stats form Google Analytics. As many other bloggers I was hit by a big evil Google Penguin that cost me a lot of traffic as you can see on the graph below…!
More than a month after the Google Penguin 2.0 update I still haven’t found out why I have lost more than half of all my traffic and I have now idea on what to do to get it back 🙁 I have talked about this issue with a lot of other bloggers that has been hit and they are also pretty chocked about the brutal change Google have made to their algorithm.
My Google Analytics Stats for Q2 2013
Traffic Types:
- Search Engines: 64.01%
- Direct Traffic: 24.05%
- Referring Sites: 11.02%
- Other: 0.02%
The biggest changes for this quarter were that my traffic from Google Search dropped with about 34%.
Search Engines:
- Google: 91.35%
- Yahoo: 5.04%
- Bing: 2.40%
Google is still the king of search, but I am a bit surprised that I still get more than 5% of my search traffic from Yahoo.
Top 5 Referring Sites:
- Stumbleupon.com
- himanshunegi.in
- social.technet.microsoft.com
- t.co (Twitter)
- Techtutorials.net
After I have lost a lot of traffic from Google I have started working to get more referring traffic because I don’t want to rely to much on Google in the future. One of the sites I have been working on is social.technet.microsoft.com and it is already on my Top 5 (number 3) for referral traffic.
Top 10 visitors by Country:
My top 10 visitors by geographic.
| 1. | United States |
| 2. | Denmark |
| 3. | United Kingdom |
| 4. | India |
| 5. | Australia |
| 6. | Canada |
| 7. | Germany |
| 8. | Philippines |
| 9. | Netherlands |
| 10. | Pakistan |
No change in top 5 visitors by geographic. It is pretty much the same.
Conclusion of my Traffic Report
Well I must admit that the big change for this quarter has been the Google Penguin 2.0. From the day the release was announced (23. May) I lost more than half of my traffic. I have been working like crazy to try and clean-up broken links and been removing bad/slow plugins to try and make the Google Search Engines more happy about my blog. So far nothing has worked. It feels very when I think about all the hard work I have put in to this blog to make it better and to attract more traffic. I am just glad that this blog only is a hobby project of mine. If my blog was my main income it would have been a disaster.
How about you? Were you also hit as bad as me by the big bad Google Penguin and what do you think could make the different to bounce back? I have always tried to play by the rules of Google best practice, but still I was hit very bad. Please leave me a comment below if you have something you would like to share with me or my readers.
Hi Thomas,
I think it’s always helpful to see other bloggers’ stats. Thanks for sharing yours with the BizSugar community. Some people can be uncomfortable sharing traffic specifics, but I think it always gives a different perspective to know a bit more about others’ experiences especially when building your own business.
Hi Heather
I love to read about others experiences and to know what the trends are online. That is why I decided to share my own reports too. Often other people are struggling with the same things that I am and quite often we can learn from each other.
has this happened to more people than not? Thomas have you ever figured out why penguin dinged you like it did? I know you mentioned the broken links etc etc, but does anyone know 100% what penguin is looking at and what it penalizes for?
Hi Scott
I don’t think that any one but Google knows for sure and they are not going to tell us. I have followed all the tips from Google Webmaster tools and tried optimizing load times and broken links, but nothing has changed. I know some very talented bloggers that are have the same issues, so I know that I am not alone.
Penguin is certainly a vicious animal! It does take a while to crawl back from the update when you’ve been hit.
I’ve been hit with the mighty penguin and after removing badlinks and using the Google Disavow tool to see where and when my site started falling, my site is slowly starting to crawl back up again.
Hi Karen
Sorry to hear that you were also affected by the Penguin 2.0 update. I have also been working very hard to cleanup broken links and other stuff to improve my blog. I have also used the Disavow tool, but so far my traffic is the same. I hope that I soon will see my traffic climb again.
Thanks very much for sharing your GA stats wit us. I can see that you get a lot of visits from search engines. I have started optimizing my site for Google and other search engines and hope to get a portion of SE traffic
I used to get a lot more traffic from Google until the Penguin 2.0 hit my blog.
@Thomas, I Agree with you, I don’t feel that any one however Google knows beyond any doubt and they are not set to let us know. I have accompanied all the tips from Google Webmaster apparatuses and tried advancing load times and broken joins, however nothing has altered. I know some exceptionally gifted bloggers that are have the same issues, so I realize that I am not alone.
Hi Kavin
It is a hard time to be a blogger, but I hope that Google will soon make some changes that will make us all bounce back a little.
Hello Thomas,
The evil penguin also affected my blog and after that I lost around 90% of my traffic and it is still going down.
I’m also trying to get traffic from other place than Google but, no luck till now.
Hi Rajnish
90% that sounds very brutal. I guess we will all have to rely more on other sources than Google in the future even if it takes a lot more work.
Yes, Thomas you are absolutely correct but I really don’t have any idea about any new source that could give me ongoing traffic, all other sources such as social media, social bookmarking all give traffic for very little period of time only.
Can you suggest me something ?
You receive traffic from mostly non-Asiatic countries and mostly from the search engines ..thats great ..i would work hard on my blog to achieve the same stats as your’s..this post is inspirational for me!
Regards,
Pramod
Thank you for visiting. How did you found my blog yourself?
Thanks for sharing this insight, I love statistics !
Me too. I hope you found it useful 🙂
It’s always nice to see others stats. Thanks for sharing them with Bizsugar community.
You have guts to showcase the traffic stats! Cheers for sharing Thomas! cheers! 😀
I have a very new blog (PR0) that’s yet to see much traffic from search engines. However, I am seeing significant referrals from Pin Interest, Stumbleupon, Technorati and Wikipedia.
Thanks for the stats Thomas. Being hit by the Penguin update is no easy thing to recover from…keep working at it and within a few months things will pick back up.
Thats really nice stats , and thats what blog is all about building readership and your blog is really really good with technical stuff i am regular visitor of your blog
Hi Pavan
That is good to hear that you come here regular 🙂
same for me, since penguin, i lost most of my traffic. Its ok if less traffic but it not ok if less online income, hahaa. Thats true.. 🙂
Hi Thomas, one of my sites was hit by the recent penguin update but in my case i was able to kinda figure out the reason – actually it related to anchor text diversity and one of the anchors looked to be dominating which is what i noticed, and then i worked on diversifying it…and almost after a month, my rankings were back to their normal climbing spree. A good tool to analyse your anchor text diversity is Majesticseo. Try it out and see if you are able to catch the culprit. Thanks
Hi Riz
thanks for your tips. I will for sure take a look at it 🙂
Hi Ritz, I was getting most of my traffic from Google images. After google’s update in Jan 2013 on images, I have lost traffic from 10k visits per month to 2k visits per month. I optimized and relied on my images in the article but now I’ve not figured what went wrong. How can I find this out? Do you see me getting back to normal in the near future? Hope you can help me out.
Hey Vinod, I dont have much idea about image seo, so i cant help on that but i would suggest that you use these sites for some analysis: majesticseo.com ahrefs.com opensiteexplorer.org
Try these and see if you can get a clue. Do share if you have a learning here. Thanks.
Been trying to figure out but unable to find out the real reason. As of what I read from the internet, the structure of google images was changed. Now users have to click twice to get to my page but earlier it was just one click. So due to this, traffic from image has drastically decreased to my site 🙁 Let me know if my understanding is correct!!!
hello thomas i also loose my 30% traffic.. what i do now.. and one thing i want to discuss is can we rely on referral traffic… and what are the best websites which send help us to get traffic… please reply…
Hi Ramesh
Sorry to hear that your traffic has dropped, but we are for sure not alone.
I think that referral traffic takes a lot of work and it might not last as long as organic traffic. The best websites depends on your niche. The best websites is the one that is related to your niche.
I can understand your feeling cause I also lost little bit of my blog daily unique visitor.
Is this the Penquin update effect, i’m also loosing traffic :(.
Arrrrgghhh Google!
I am afraid so 🙁
I love dofollow site and thanks for making your site dofollow.Thank you
It sure is scary when your traffic drops. It is not a good thing constantly to loose the traffic. your keywords might go down as well
thanks for share the report.. as i tell you there is small increase in my blog traffic due to pengium update, This update is good for me….
Hi thomas. Organic traffic is more useful for most bloggers. These days i’m trying to boost traffic from China.So i added my site map to Baidu. But so far i can’t see anyone come to my blog from Baidu. Could you give some tips how to get china traffic to my blog ?
Sorry, but I have no experience driving traffic from China to my blog.
Hello Thomas,
Glad to hear that my site is sending some traffic to you 🙂
Hehe, keep them coming 🙂