Negative Results of Google Instant Search

Another problem is that Instant suggestion results change over time. So it can hit you also in the future. For example, I was on 1. position in SERP and suddenly I was only on 10% of traffic for a given keyword. I suspect that Instant is the cause of that. Namely a suggestion in Instant results are now showing other keyword before mine. And some of them are also longer !!! Like for example added year after keyword (shiny search 2011). I will try to add a year in Title and description to see if this helps.

Hey Justin,

Is it caused by your domain URL prefix? because this happened to me as well, as i changed my blog from non-www to www half a year ago, i lost all my backlinks, PR, and traffics, i had to rebuild it again.

I noticed you changed from http://dragonblogger.com to http://www.dragonblogger.com

Hi, my website www.myweddingchecklist.net also suffered a heavy drop of visitors starting just the day Google Instant released. My visits went down about 60%, since it was getting most of the visits from long tail searches.
A little time ago, everyone was suggesting optimizing for long tail. Now what do we do with all those pages?

I'm really honestly surprised you were hit so hard, I'm down about 4% which as you know can vary month to month. I'm glad I wasnt hit as hard as you. I run about 45% SEO traffic. a 30% loss has got to hurt!
Kimberly

Are you sure that Google Instant is the problem of the results?Could't be more than that?

I've see almost the same data in my analytics account. I hope this situation will be solved soon because we loose traffic and money with this new feature implementation in Google searches.

Like you,i also experienced drastic decrease in traffic to my blogs.Every time google changes their algorithm,the people who thrive on using SEO tactics for traffic gets affected and has to go through a learning curve to accommodate for the changes.Hope i will find a way to get my traffic stats to normal levels again.

Wow. That sucks but this completely changes how we do SEO now. It's not good for websites like yours and mine but if we adapt to this new system, we can outlast everyone else in the long run.

This quite not a good news, it seems you have wrote about his before, saying if it wouldn't affect this blog.
Its now clear for all of us all not to put our eggs in a basket, not to relay too much on search engine traffic, we should promote through other ways such as social sites and direct links.

I can't give out any conclusions yet as the update just happened for a few weeks. We will need more time to see its effects. At the moment, fortunately I don't see many changes with my long tail keywords. :D

Thats exactly the proof of the results I was blogging about regarding google instant searches.
Larger websites who occupy the top spots in search engine rankings will eat some of the long-tail traffic as they usually already provide what the searcher looks for (or not...).
So for google its back to square one, over 10 years ago, where they not even had a tenth of pages in their index.

Man this is why I said Instant was a joke. To sped so much time and money to rank for keywords on Google, then to have Google make a change that screws that all up.. ridiculous man.

All this because it saves 1.5 sec? iS gOOGLE KIDDING ME?

Why dont they focus more on ranking relevant sites, not posts that are 3 yrs old, over many other more relevant sites.

Google has def made a move to focus more on the searcher then on the people providing the info Google needs to exist.. BIG mistake man.

Sites with high authority and searchers in general will benefit but for mid to lower-tier bloggers, Google Instant Search has shifted the goal posts drastically.

Justin, my blog is so new that I get very little search engine traffic. What's amazing is that both of my old blogs are doing quite well since the change. I'm totally confused about how Google does it's thing. Soon as I think I got it figured out, they change it!

I like you have learned over the last 10 years that counting on SE traffic is a dangerous business. However you always have to work for it which is an entirely different story.

Wow! Have we all learned a lesson here or what? But I think I'm onto something, Draggie! Check out the comments (particularly MINE) on Karen's blog:
http://blazingminds.co.uk/observation-google-instant-long/

Hi DB,

I've learned this difficult lesson as well. Relying on one method or strategy to drive traffic can hurt you when that method is made obsolete.

Thanks for sharing with us.

Ryan

This is terrible. I've noticed a drop across most of my sites as well and i suspect Google instant is the cause.

I honestly think this isn't fair to newer sites that haven't been around for 5+ years. Sites with high authority will always pop-up first because they can rank quicker and easier for shorter keyword phrases..

Ya... It really sucks esp for long tail keywords. btw, check out today's techcrunch article about this...

Oh, so that's how instant search affect your blog. It seems we must try hard to rank for short keyword then.

I don't understand your September pie chart. It should add up to 100% in total, but it says 44% of your traffic comes from search engines, 23% from referring sites, 15% direct traffic and 1% from "other". That adds up to around 83%. Where does the last 17% of your traffic come from? :)