I've been working on reducing the amount of traffic I get through search. It's really hard.

Before asking if I'm crazy, I don't mean number of visitors. I mean the percentage of traffic from search.

Once upon a time, 90%+ of my traffic came from search alone (99% of that was google). Now, I'm down to about 70% from search, though total traffic is up 300%.

I get a lot of traffic through other people's blogs, social network sites, etc. I'm working on new content but, new content always boosts my search ratings.


So, what do you guys do to get less search traffic?

I'll throw a few ideas out:

• Link baiting
• Useful services (free or paid)
• Controversy
• Host a Community
• Newsletter
• Advertising
• Contests

While I think doing the extra things you're doing is great because they build more traffic, I'd think a little bit about having a lower percentage of search engine traffic as a goal. In some cases (not all), search engine traffic might actually be better. Why? From a conversion standpoint, visitors from a search engine are actively looking for something (perhaps to buy) and that mindset is different from someone who comes from your MySpace profile because they know you and they're curious about what your site looks like. That said, your visitors can also be pre-qualified from other people's blogs, etc.

I just disallow searchbots from visiting my site via a robots.txt file or just remove my URL from the SE index .

Seriously though, I think the word-of-mouth referrals do wonders. When *actual people* talk about visiting your site, you'll get great visitors, and they'll probably return again and again if you have something they're interested in .

Paul I don't think you're crazy. A few years ago I was getting a similar % of my traffic from search engines and set out to lower the rate of my overall traffic. You simply have to get more traffic from other sources. What you're doing now is the right approach and you have to give it some time.

It looks like you're already moving in the right direction. Keep doing what you're doing and look for other sources of traffic.

One thing I notice is your blog is hosted on blogger. You might think about hosting it on your domain and working to build subscribers.

VM the reason you might not want all your traffic coming from search engines is that overnight an algorithm can change and you can lose all your traffic. That makes you very dependent on a single source for your revenue. If you diversify your traffic and you lost the traffic from search it won't hit you so hard.

Originally Posted by vangogh

VM the reason you might not want all your traffic coming from search engines is that overnight an algorithm can change and you can lose all your traffic. That makes you very dependent on a single source for your revenue. If you diversify your traffic and you lost the traffic from search it won't hit you so hard.

I think a good practice would be to imagine that *there are no search engines*, and think about different ways you could get traffic if they never existed.

Originally Posted by vangogh

One thing I notice is your blog is hosted on blogger. You might think about hosting it on your domain and working to build subscribers.

Thanks. I'm currently deciding whether to build my own blog engine or to install apache roller. I'll probably go with the later due to lack of spare time but, I like the idea of building a blog on top of apach jackrabbit.

I'm not sure whether I'd go for building my own blog engine. I'm happy working with WordPress. It would be an interesting project, though.

Good idea James. Search engines can provide some great traffic, but it's best to vary the sources since that traffic could go away in a hurry.

Word press is good but, I run a tomcat server so, in order to conserve memory, I'd like to have something that will run on it (thus apache roller).

The other downer for me, is MySQL, I'd prefer to use PostgreSQL. But, I guess MySQL is faster for reads, and that's most of what it's going to get in a blog. Though, I'll have mad caching so, it's not like the DB will get called very often anyway...

I'll be using SiteMesh with whatever I use so I can make it fit into the look-and-feel of my site, and have one basic template for the entire thing.

Technically, there isn't much to a blog (within my requirements). I've built simple blogs before using Spring and Hibernate in just a day. I think I'll need about a week or two to build one to my own specs. Finding the week will be difficult. (at work, I'm currently replacing Verizon's VCast service and building the engine for Yahoo's music service).

I also have to admit, I started the thread with a "slightly" baiting title since, 90% of posts around the board are about getting more search traffic.

i'm confused. why would you want a lower % traffic from search? are you just wanting to increase your referral and direct traffic?

Yes, he doesn't mean that he wants less search traffic, he means that he wants more non-search traffic.

Links, links and more links is the answer. Quality content makes attaining links orders of magnitude easier, of course.

Jeremy it's not about having less search traffic, but increasing other traffic thereby lowering the percentage of traffic from search engines. If that makes sense. It's about not being so dependent on one source of traffic.

Paul I wasn't suggesting you shouldn't create a blog engine. Just meant that I'm not sure I'd be up for the task.

Hi Paul

Paul I get less than 1% search engine traffic.

I do not bother to list new web pages in search engines but google always finds them.

I get most of my traffic by using networking sites and surf for traffic exchanges.

Paul all my web pages and affiliate sites get about 10,000 visits a day betwen them all.

Paul hope this helps.

A better way to word it would not be less search traffic, but rather more traffic from referring sites, correct?

75% of my sites traffic comes from search engines. I'm looking to increase the referring site percentage so that Google's algorithm changes have less of an impact on me. The best way to do this is to take advantage of that high search engine percentage and when they find these pages in search engines get them to link to them from other sites.

It's a good idea to maintain a presence in a variety of communities. Bama I assume you were getting a significant amount of traffic from EF and you'll get it from WT. I usually get a consistent stream from all the forums where I'm active.

Another source is blog commenting. It has to be consistent commenting on the same blog to really start driving traffic.

Links are obviously good, but not all will send direct traffic. Depends on the other site and where your link is located. Most of the direct traffic I get through links is from a small handful of sites, though I do get a good amount of traffic from them.

Social media is another good place. If you participate in the community the community will get curious about you and visit. Most every social media profile I have (assuming I'm active on the site) sends traffic my way.

Naturally the better your content the more likely people will link to it and visit it. That's very true of social media. If you can write content to specifically attract the community on any social site you can gain traffic from that site.

And if you do build a great site with great content you should find people return time and again. One of the reasons a blog can work so well. It gets people subscribing and brings them back without the need of any of the above.