A Valuable Blogging Lesson

Google's new Instant Search does change things up a bit but I would also suggest the next time you will be gone away for a while to not just schedule tweets but schedule some SEO'd posts as well ;)

p.s.
You and me both are slipping on the guest posting

I had a feeling that the long tail would be affected by Google Instant. It sounds like you are experiencing some of that.

I would encourage you to not abandon SEO though for a couple simple reasons.

1) SEO will introduce large numbers of new people to your site. Many of your referrals will be people already familiar with your site.

2) Organic search engine traffic is buying traffic. They will click your ads and get you paid. Social traffic in general is worth a lot less than organic on a per visitor basis.

Balance of traffic sounds nice, but I would rather have 100% organic traffic than 99%.

Just my opinion-

The solution you found is make a healtier ratio of organic traffic, referral traffic and direct traffic, but what was the problem? Did you made a thorough research and found why traffic was dropped down that way?

I guess you paid the price for putting all your eggs into one basket, no matter how much we push on SEO, there will be days when nothing works and if we rely solely on search engines for traffic then that's not right because search engines keep making changes but if you visit few blogs and make friends with the blog owners, they'll always help you when your not doing so well in traffic. I have seen blog owners getting a huge traffic just from commenting on other blogs and being friends with them.

It really helps.

This happened to me a few times before when I went on a blogging hiatus. At first I was disappointed and discouraged but I realized that I could use that instead to motivate myself to do better. Guess what? It worked and now my site traffic is growing so fast to the point where I'm worried I'll have to upgrade again to a higher hosting package.

Don't worry, you'll get it back. Just keep on doing what you do best. All the best to you and your blog! :)

Great lessons learned and I usually balance my traffic source and never rely on SEs only. It is very risky if Google ban us or accidentally ban us some days. I hope you learned a lot from this too :-) Keep it up and you will see your traffic up again

That means Google Instant is not quite good to the bloggers because normally the top search results dominated by those high ranking websites.

I'm a little confused by the post, are you essentially moving away from SEO?

This happened to me when i was lazy to blog, i didn't post for weeks and didn't comments anywhere, wasn't active in forums, i wanted to try..

Indeed the traffic dropped..I learnt a lesson, without doubts, link building and fresh content will help alot.

Back about 5 years, I kid you not, almost 45% of my traffic came from Technorati! That all changed when the T-powers decided that MySpace websites were blogs, and screwed up their system (and I don't think to this day they've recovered in terms of prestige and authority)... if I get one visitor from T-rati in a month's time these days I'm lucky! Ditto "digg," which used to bring me spikes of traffic. Although people have "dugg" some of my posts, quite good ones I must say ;) - they've gone nowhere on digg!

Obviously, successful bloggers are going to have to find new ways to attract traffic... better posts, coupled with leaving commentst and linkbacks on articles "blogged" by the Washington Post and similar mainstreammedia outlets. Let's keep thinkin' everyone, and don't get discouraged!

Google Instant is also the problem make me worried. I realize that people rarely turn to page 2 or results at the bottom now. Instead, they type new keywords and my blog can't compete with other high authority sites.

hey Justin, actually i have heard a lot of compliants about this new Google search. I haven't looked at my analytics to see if I was affected but most likely just like you my traffic might be down.

Hopefully the SEO guro's will figure a way to take advantage of Google new technology. I'm sure there will be a way the questions is how long and how.

That is a large drop in traffic. Like you I get most of my traffic from Google, but haven't noticed any drop in traffic, in fact I have noticed a slight increase. Perhaps my blog has benefited from the instant search.

I try to publish at least on post a week to keep things fresh.

On the other hand, my AdSense earning took a tremendous beating last month - a 50% drop. While my traffic is going up, my earnings are going down. Now I have to figure out why.

You had tweets scheduled while you were on vacation, but did you schedule posts to go live while you were away, too? Not that I'm an expert on these things, but I heard it bruited about that the more frequent you publish the bigger the number of visitors to your blog especially one that's highly optimized like yours.

It could well be something to do with the new Google search system, I've noticed when I've experimented with it since the change a lot of the search results do seem to be different and at sometimes erratic. I've got my fingers crossed that you will hit that chunk of traffic again real soon ;)

Ohh wow, I didn't realize it could hit you that hard. That is not really cool. How and what methods will you be using while link building, and what made you not do it so much after you made an effort to optimize your posts?

Wow, that's a big drop in traffic. Sorry to hear that. I'm almost certain that Google Instant had an instant (!) affect on my traffic too, and not in a good way. I'll learn more in a few weeks time when I do my montly reports as I need more time than just a few days to determine if it had an impact or not, since my google traffic goes up and down depending whether or not Caroline Wozniacki is playing tennis tournaments :)

But your loss of traffic must mean that somebody else got more, so we just need to figure out how they're doing it to get more and do what they do.

I guess it goes to show you how just as important it is to increase traffic to your site using link building, commenting on other blogs in addition to seo. I think sometime when we get on a role doing one thing and get caught up on it and lose track of other facets involved. At least you recognize what you haven't been doing and can resolve it.