Ranking Observation

All...

I set time aside last night and this morning to review historical ranking statistics across about 15 sites of mine. Some of these sites are churn/brun type splogs and others are very well-put-together sites with lots of good content written by me in a field I am very familiar with.

I've long suspected that the minute I see a site's traffic spike, I can almost always expect a crash down to earth. I recalled seeing this with both newer (less than 6 weeks old) and older sites (few months old). I almost get nervous when I see a site spike like my most recent splog did last week, knowing it will crash a few days later (which it did).

My research this morning confirmed my anecdotal evidence. Virtually every site I own has gone through this at least once (and in some cases, multiple times).

What typically happens is that a site that's getting a handful to a few dozen visitors per day will suddenly start spiking until it hits 100-300 visitors per day and once in peaks, it comes tumbling down almost overnight. This typically occurs in the span of no more than a week.

Since this happens primarily with newer sites, I've been chalking it up to the Google honeymoon period. I also wonder if it isn't a function of more exposure generating more spam reports maybe? Although, I've discounted this possibility since my good sites also experience this behavior.

Has anyone ever investigated this with their own sites? If so, what were your findings? Were they similar to mine, different?

Tom