I’ve had an interesting turn of events lately with search engine traffic. Generally, when I add pages or create a new site, I will upload a sitemap to Google, and link from another one of my sites. Google usually has the site indexed within hours and cached within a day. From then on, Google is pretty much the largest source of traffic.

Until now. One of the other sites I launched last month has been indexed and cached by Google, but I’ve noticed two or three of the other “major” search engines indexing it more often than usual. Additionally, the amount of traffic generated by the other search engines (Live, Yahoo, etc…) has outweighed the Google traffic exponentially. Google traffic is about the same as before, but the other engines are driving many times the amount of visitors to my new site, than they have prior.

I am working on split testing the sites to narrow down the reasons for the unusually high traffic, and hope to soon have some results to implement on my older sites seeing more Google visitors.

In addition to the higher visitation rate, my sites are starting to rank higher in the results on the other engines as well. I have some theories concerning my page layout and meta information, but nothing solidified yet.