Linear Versus Exponential Traffic Growth (White Hat vs Grey Hat Methods)

[harrytwatter]

I've worked on a lot of sites, both small and large, mostly "white hat", and growth has pretty much always been linear, minus updates where there were slightly higher than usual gains, or on the flip side, drops.

I also see these massive jumps in ranking/traffic in other SEO communities, sometimes crudely referred to as "ranking boners". I'm under the impression that 99% of these are either rebuilds or have stacked 301's and that's what explains the aggressive growth velocity.

BUT I've recently been testing some more "grey hat" tactics, including edits, GPs, PBNs, and citations. I guess maybe I'm being overly hopeful, but has anyone seen big jumps in organic traffic similar to a "ranking boner" without it being attributed to a rebuilt domain getting re-indexed or having a powerful 301 added?

Basically I'm trying to justify my GA refresh addiction.. because I'm holding out that some of my more aggressive link building will kind of hit all at once and I'll wake up to a Christmas morning one of these days..

Go ahead, burst my bubble.. we all need to find out Santa isn't real one day..

 

[Ryuzaki]

@harrytwatter, I'm assuming you're talking about organic traffic only. With social media and normal marketing you can explode immediately.

The only times I've seen huge explosions in organic traffic (hockey stick style) is when I start a new site and go absolutely hard on it. Great design, speed optimized, 100 posts, getting tons of links... all out of the gates. A year will go by and then the floodgates are opened for traffic. So it's always a bunch of front loading off effort. And the "explosion" looks huge years later when the graph is compressed but it's really over the course of months and months.

Otherwise you can get some really high volume rankings all of the sudden on an otherwise non-mature (low traffic) site that looks really impressive. There's also the question of the scale of the analytics graph again, where someone might compress 3 months into what looks like 1 week, and show huge growth but it's over 6 months or so.

I can imagine someone with a small site of 30 posts with tons of links and killing it on those 30 posts dropping a fat 200 extra posts on it real fast suddenly scraping in tons of extra traffic. But yeah in general I'd take all claims with a handful of salt.