Traffic slowdown this year?

[RDude]

I'm just wondering if anyone else has noticed a traffic slowdown this year. Google has hit me a few times with their changes etc, but usually it isn't to this degree. It isn't horrible mind you, but I'm wondering if anyone else has experience this and what, if anything, have you done to rectify it.

Thanks

[PFLJayden]

We haven't noticed anything different.... But we haven't really followed Google much, although then again we do buy adwords.

[Bi4life]

Hi Guys,
I haven't been on here in ages: Mind if I throw in my 'two cents' worth? I'm too (stubborn,foolish,cantankerous) to spend a single dime on a blog (Gasp!!), so I'm still playing around with my free-hosted blog. It generates just enough income to keep me happy.
In the past several weeks, my visitors dropped like a rock. Google was penalizing me because I had two homepages (www and non-www). In addition, those Nibble-guys (my free webhost) just re-vamped their entire site.
I decided to take advantage of this lull. I got a 301 redirect, so all clicks to either link come to my non-www homepage. I verified my blog with Google (and my Bing index nearly disappeared) SO, I verified my blog with Bing, too. Their numbers are VERY slow to respond. Now my Yandex index has plummeted. (You can't win).
Since two-thirds of my customers were staying away anyway, I decided to re-vamp all parts of my blog. New theme, new banners, got rid of non-profitable sponsors, and removed 100% of my feed generated content. Now my blog is 85% sponsored videos, and 15% new, larger pics. In addition, I 'Pushed to check' for HTML and CSS errors, dead links, proper meta tags, etc.
Well, I must have done something right, because my numbers have SLOWLY begun to climb over the past few days.
I don't know if input from a 'free-blogger' will be of much use to anyone, but I sure enjoyed sharing anyway.
Thanks for listening. David (Bi4life).
(I wish you guys could visit my 'NEW' blog, but don't think I'm allowed to list the address here). D.

[nickbaer]

This summer reminds me of 2010, and the last US national election cycle. People are working on campaigns, and more importantly, contributing to political campaigns with dollar donations. That's reducing our share of consumers' expendable income.

This year, not only do we have a Presidential race on the ballot, but also various forms of Marriage amendments and related ballot initiatives. The whole Marriage campaign really has a lot of men and women working on campaign efforts, like we've not seen in regular political campaigns for local, county, state and federal elected offices. Much of that started at local Pride events in June.

Then, there were the East coast storms that left millions without electricity for days on end.

[dirtyratstudios]

Mainstream has been terrible this year but adult has been much the same as last year in terms of sales but with a small increase in traffic. I'm hoping that the extended downtime that I had recently due to hosting problems doesn't impact on the traffic longer term. It must be the longest period of downtime I've had in at least a decade.

In terms of weather we've had a terrible summer so far which has probably kept people indoors and online. But there is the Olympics coming up which may be a distraction and the weather is due to pick up

[sc32803]

there is the Olympics coming up

Hopefully our customers will see those sexy male gymnasts, divers and wrestlers and get turned on enough to buy some porn!

To answer the original question I have been seeing steady decreases in my blog traffic and its starting to worry me. I'm going to do some "summer make-overs" to my worst performing sites to see if I can boost traffic.

It just seems to me that you MUST have video on your site to show up in search results these days and I have always relied on photos in the past, so I guess this old dog will have to learn some new tricks.

[dirtyratstudios]

Presenter Jon Snow gets a little flustered when gymnast Louis Smith strips down to his leotard.

[Mansized]

There's TRAFFIC?!?