Matt McGee started an excellent discussion thread at Sphinn asking, “How Much Search Traffic is Too Much?”

It is a good question, especially with the ups and downs sites see with Google and Bing doing algorithm updates.

How much of your overall traffic should be from search engines? Is it ever too much?

I have some clients that have over 90% of their traffic from search engines! Over 90%! My sites, like this one and others, normally get about 60% or so from search engines – we get a lot of social media traffic, direct and so on.

Is 90% excessive and borderline scary? What if Google changes their algorithm or mistakenly labels your site as a site doing something against their guidelines. What if your developer does something stupid and Google drops you from their index?

Should you rely that much on search traffic?

Now, you can easily look at your traffic overview and see how much traffic you get from search engines versus referral sites and so on. But if you drill in, often the search traffic is from people doing direct searches, looking for your company by typing in your company name. Does that count?

Let me share some of the outstanding posts at Sphinn:

Matt McGee said:

Todd Mintz said:

Jill Whalen said:

There is a lot of other great comments in the thread and please add yours to the Sphinn thread.

Forum discussion at Sphinn.