Perhaps things aren't so dire for Google+ after all.

Last week the company opened Google+ to the public, and traffic rocketed. Web traffic tracker Experian Hitwise reported this afternoon that Google+ now number 8 in its rankings of top social networking and forums Web sites, and got 15 million U.S. visitors last week, putting it just behind MySpace.

And that doesn't include mobile visitors, or traffic entirely from the black notification bar.

The week before, Google+ was number 54 with 1.1 million visits.

Hang on a second -- number 54? That's actually the most shocking fact of all, given that it was in 42nd place back in July with 1.8 million visits.

So it looks like interest in Google+ really was dropping until Google opened it up.

By way of comparison, number-one Facebook got 1.75 billion visits from U.S. users during the week.

Update: In the category of social networking, Google+ is now #6. Last week, it was #21 -- one notch below where it was back in July.

Here's the full top ten:

See also: These 19 Social Networking Sites Are Bigger Than Google+.