Site Traffic down by 80%

[d33man]

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Yesterday my site had a decrease in G traffic by 80%. This has continued into today.

Received a timely email from Axandra.com:

1. Google has increased the snippet length. Less visitors for you?
2. Google now shows more related searches at the bottom of the results
3. Google now shows local results based on IP addresses

I'm going to expand on their article (not my words):

1. Google has increased the snippet length. Less visitors for you?

Google now shows an extended snippet for queries that consist of three or more keywords. The idea behind this change is that these multi-word queries are very targeted and complex. The usual short snippet might not contain enough information.

- Fewer users might click as they see longer snippets from your website
- Users may keep refining their search in Google until they find what they want meaning you'll less convert potential sales as they'll never land on your site
- The longer snippets move results further down the page meaning your results may not get read

Anyone with thoughts/more info on this?

Thanks, D

[confuscius]

This change is great news for content affiliates. The more quality content visible the better as far as I am concerned. It is great to see how many ways you can spin cheap, cheaper, cheapest, buy, stock, purchase, get, find, etc, etc into pointless and irrelevant content that makes any sensible human being just glaze over and move on.

All I can see so far is people spending more time going deeper into Google to find what they are looking for on their first search - real power to those who cannot quite make page one for the generic short phrase but Google inserting the greater context around the short phrase really does attempt to push people away from the kings of spam spinning to the artisans of crafted content.

Let's hope they double the snippet size again and make it functional on even shorter phrases.