Nothing had changed in the recent past before these peaks. There were no internal site changes and no additional external links.
These spikes did not happen at times where other Webmasters were reporting major Google index changes. (I wouldn't expect such anyway since they returned to normal after a few days.)
The sites get search traffic from a wide swath of keywords that cut across many categories. The traffic is spread pretty evenly across keywords and keyword categories.
When looking at the increase, including when it was happening, it was clear that rankings increased across the board.
From between two to four days (depending on the incident), the traffic jumped up and remained the same for a bit, and then dropped back down.
What is the explanation for this? Here's the latest Webmaster world thread.
The threads give a number of theories:
- Google was testing some major change and the site benefited during that period.
- The site was on the edge of some filter and for some reason passed it and then went back down.
- Google specifically was testing this site to see its impact on user behavior.
There are others as well. Because there were no obvious internal or external site changes, and no related webmaster posts at the time, I'm inclined to believe the latter reason.
Of course, I don't know the real reason, but in any case I wish the traffic would stay at the higher rate :).
Follow my blog. I'd be eternally grateful.
