Does Anyone Have Any Thoughts On Google Traffic Throttling?

There are more than a few good SEO's who think Google places some sort of cap on traffic on a site by site basis. I was wondering if any of the search people here have any thoughts on this or first hand experience perhaps. We certainly have sites in our network that have grown in content by hundreds if not thousands of pages and yet the daily traffic remains about the same. Recently we "pushed" a site through the threshold and watched the organic traffic go from just a few thousand per day to 15,000 uniques per day. It looked very much like the brake had been released at some point.


"I have a strong suspicion that google is "Traffic Throttling". This started about a year ago when we saw a lot of newer sites start appearing in the serps, displacing many of the older, established sites that had dominated the top 10 positions for years.

Google had to figure a way of giving everyone a piece of the pie, without causing too much disruption to the older, respected sites. Some of the newer sites certainly deserved to start getting some decent results on some search terms.

So in my sector, I saw my site (and most of my long stranding competitors) losing position on a number of key terms, with some newer sites coming in on certain terms.

For example, I would find that my search term "red widget" retained it's number 1 or 2 spot, while I sank to page 2 of the results for "blue widget", with my previous top 3 position taken by one of the newcomers in our travel sector.

Around the same time, the number of google referrals into my site became very stable, with very little fluctuation in daily totals.

Previously, there had been some wide variations in the amount of traffic received from google.

They had to figure some way to give decent newer sites some recognition and placings in the serps, and putting a limit on the amount of traffic it sends through to a domain appears to have been a way to achieve this."

Quote from WMW -

This is a great subject, I am certain google has a way of limiting traffic. I've created enough new sites over the last couple of years to know this issue is very real. More recently I had a site jumping between #3 & #9 for a 3.5 million per month term. Volumes would vary from 35 vistits per hour to 140 vistits per hour, shortly after we dropped away to a steady #8 - 9 and peaked at 25 - 30 visits per hour. The last couple of days we are steady at #6 and peaking at #40 per hour. My point is this, we are still a long way below the 130 per hour and we have sinced moved into the top 5 for another high volume term on the same site and the traffic level remains about the same. Google is giving with one hand and taking with the other. It's clever, they have so many versions for any given search term it makes their system that much harder to game and they can still return good results. I think at some point you do break through this threshold, once you gain the right amount of points. Content alone will not get you where you want to go, I've tried just adding more good quality content to a couple of sites and the traffic remains about the same.