So I tried to move without a search engine , and only social sharing, but for a small blog like mine, that means almost 75% of traffic comes via search engines.
Maybe the ratio of traffic from search to social will change in the future,
I have now enough data to conclude search is the ONLY statistically significant driver of traffic ( for a small blog)
If you are a blogger you should definitely try and give the tools at Google Webmaster a go,
eg
https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/googlebot-fetch
URL Googlebot type Fetch Status Fetch date
https://decisionstats.com/ Web Denied by robots.txt 1/19/12 8:25 PM
https://decisionstats.com/ Web Success URL and linked pages submitted to index 12/27/11 9:55 PM
Also from Google Analytics, I see that denying search traffic doesnot increase direct/ referral traffic in any meaningful way.
So my hypothesis that some direct traffic was mis-counted as search traffic due to Chrome, toolbar search – well the hypothesis was wrong 🙂
Also Google seems to drop url quite quickly (within 18 hours) and I will test the rebound in SERPs in a few hours. I was using meta tags, blocked using robots.txt, and removal via webmasters ( a combination of the three may have helped)
To my surprise search traffic declined to 5-10, but it did not become 0. I wonder why that happens (I even got a few Google queries per day) and I was blocking the “/” fron robots.txt.
Net Net- The numbers below show- as of now , in a non SOPA, non Social world, Search Engines remain the webmasters only true friend (till they come up with another panda or whatever update 😉 )
