Search Spike over the weekend

[alhallinan]

I own a website, and recently had a HUGE spike in organic search traffic from Google over the weekend.

It seems to be going back down.

Anyone have any idea why? Anyone have any similar experiences?

odd-traffic.png

[KeriMorgret]

I'd drill down to look at the keywords and see if it's a particular keyword that spiked or if it was Google traffic as a whole that spiked. You can then look and see if there was a news event or something like that.

I have a similar head-scratcher that I didn't catch in time. I saw a spike in queries from Yahoo for [uss iowa], but not from Bing, and my site isn't in the first four pages for that term. My guess is that Yahoo featured something on their home page that included a search for that term (the USS Iowa left the SF area this weekend and did make the news). This was just a one-day thing and then it disappeared again.

[Chenzo]

Going into the weekend search queries and traffic across the board with my clients has been crazy. Now Witt the post penguin update, things are even wackier! See if for some reason maybe some internal subpages of newer content has made some increase in rankings and be sure to analyze the entry points and referring sites and or keywords. Your webmaster tools will play a major role in this riddle.

[alhallinan]

It was Google organic traffic as a whole that spiked. 4 or 5 keywords brought in the extra traffic, and these are keywords I usually rank in position 8 or 9 for.