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Ok so what happened to August? My computer is telling me that today is August 27 but that can't be right can it? Surely it's only the middle of the month?

Well I guess I can wish but wishing isn't going to change the reality that it really is just about the end of the month. It just seems as though I've missed a lot of this month and suddenly here it is at the end and I'm supposed to have finished a whole heap of work for clients and for our own projects.

The end of the month also means that college is starting back in the United States and if you're one of those who still see big swings in traffic between summer and the rest of the year then you probably can't wait to see those signups happening again.

As I've said before, I'm not a big believer in the summer slowdown anymore. I'm sure that it was something that happened until a few years ago but these days the Internet is such a big part of so many people's lives that they're going to be hitting the Net regardless of what season it might be.

However Google would disagree with me on that point. Matt Cutts recently mentioned that summertime was the time Google did much of their testing because the demand on their servers was not as great during summer as it was over the rest of the year. Maybe that's why they have obviously been doing some testing ... or fiddling ... this summer.

Now I'm not talking about Google's Caffeine experiment that's still ongoing, that's something that was entirely different to what many of us have seen since some time in the first two weeks of June.

Back then people began to notice that Google's search engine results pages (SERPS) were beginning to return some very unusual results and sites that had ruled at the top of the SERPS for years in some cases disappeared almost entirely. That seemed to take a couple of weeks to filter down through most verticals and then it all began to change again.

Some suggested that Google had rolled out a crappy update and then tried to revert to a much earlier version only to find that that made things even worse. I'm not sure what the situation really was ... maybe it was a bad 'data push' as Matt Cutts described a mess a few years ago or maybe it was testing ... but some of our sites began to suffer while others did very well for a time.

Now though things seem to be getting back to normal and some of the people who post on the Webmaster boards are breathing big sighs of relief as their sites come back to the positions they were in prior to June.

Perhaps Google was using what they consider to be a quite time to do some live testing ... if that's the case then it's a shame that their 'testing' can have such a negative impact on the people that Google relies on for their content - i.e. us webmasters. If it really was a test then it has to have been one of the longest that Google has run ... three months of less than favorable rankings can sure hurt if you're relying on Google for your income.

It's not as if making money online isn't hard enough without Google's manipulations. Some figures for online retailers for July are positively scary.

Shopping cart abandonment - what happens when someone actually places items in their online shopping cart but leaves before going through the checkout procedure - has always been a major problem for online retailers and some people make a very nice living from helping online shops to reduce the rate of abandonment.

They might make an even nicer living in the coming weeks as more and more online shops decide that the abandonment rate for July was just way too much. The rate of abandonment has always been high for a variety of reasons but I've never seen it as high as it was in July when the abandonment rate went to over 72%.

Yep the online retailers that are monitored by FireClick sold to only slightly over one in every four people who thought enough about buying to actually go through the process of actually putting stock into their shopping cart.

It seems that selling online can be tough whether you're selling adult material or mainstream items.

And now I'm off to trying and cram those two weeks I think I missed into the next two days. It should be interesting because, while the house move went well, we're still looking in boxes and we've got some networking issues as well.