This past week many webmasters noticed a dramatic dip in traffic and consequently sales. This is far from definitive, but I can point to some clues to the traffic and sales woes. The following are quoted from the SEM2 discussion list, a Pay-per-click professionals group.

One of my clients is seeing a 10% decrease in traffic this month. 

I too, have noticed a drop in traffic and sales on all my PPC accounts for various vendors in the past two weeks. In most cases the CTR (click through ratio) is the same.

We observed a drop in visits from week 9 (80,000) to week 10 (67,000) too.

I’d like to propose that all list members with easy access to web stats or to traffic logs of clients check that traffic (along with your own) for the last week in February and first week of March, where I believe every single one are quite likely to show a significant drop in traffic within that time frame.

It’s being discussed at WebMasterWorld and in other forums as well – where most are attributing the drop to the Google BigDaddy update. Everyone is looking at pages dropping from the index and going “supplemental” in result sets, which appears to have caused about a 10 day ripple in traffic numbers. GoogleGuy chimes in on March 5th page 20, post #195, saying

“It may take a week or so to sort this out and be sure, but I do expect these pages to come back to the main index.”

I had several clients contact me for explanations of drops in traffic and sales this past week, when each of them experienced that same, very noticeable drop in traffic & sales numbers.

My own sites experienced a drop of 30% or more in traffic. But the good news is that today those numbers appear to be back to normal, and so do client sites. It appears GoogleGuy knows his stuff. 😉