I’ve had email from three separate bloggers today asking me to explain why they’ve seen increases in traffic over the last 24 hours from Google.
I’m not an SEO expert and wouldn’t claim to really understand the ins and outs of how Google updates but there seems to be movement in the way they are indexing some sites in the last day or two.
Some are claiming that the infamous ‘Google Sandbox’ might have been updated to allow some sites that have proved themselves out to be included in their results pages. This explanation seems reasonable to me as each person who has emailed me is talking about blogs that are relatively new and that have never been indexed particularly well in Google.
Others will probably say that this is just a routine tweak of the algorithm or a roll out of a new setting in some datacenters – the truth be told, I don’t really know anything except that something’s happening.
Have you noticed any changes in traffic levels that Google is sending your blog in the last couple of days?
Update: I’ve just checked the stats of a number of my own blogs and the stats of a few other blogs that I’ve had dealings with in the last month or so and see evidence of this movement there in many of them also. In those that have had changes there is increases in traffic from between 80 and 500%. That sounds pretty massive but none of them were getting much traffic before yesterday so it’s not quite as spectacular as it sounds.
Of course this is not happening in all of the blog stats that I checked – my more established blogs have had no real change and I suspect that this will be the case for most blogs.
