Saturday, July 27, 2002
Googletracking
I'm sorry, I just find this stuff interesting.
Marcus wrote in, asking why Google seems to have abandoned his weblog, although I'm not sure if he was asking about referers from Google, or Google actually spidering his site. Hard to say what is going on, and from doing some research on my own server I did come across some rather interesting figures.
| Date of log | Googlebot hits | Google referers | Comments |
|---|---|---|---|
| October 2001 | 0 | 0 | blog went live 10/22 |
| November 2001 | 721 | 26 | |
| December 2001 | 1,421 | 348 | |
| January 2002 | 579 | 733 | |
| February 2002 | 341 | 1,073 | something wrong with Googlebot? |
| March 2002 | 854 | 694 | |
| April 2002 | 1,019 | 649 | |
| May 2002 | 1,073 | 675 | |
| June 2002 | 1,228 | 504 | |
| July 2002 | 994 | 512 | incomplete month |
While traffic from Google's spider has gone up, actual traffic from their engine has gone down. I'm not sure if they've tweaked their page ranking algorithm to decrease the their sensativity to blogs, or I'm now fighting with a bazillion other weblogs for Google traffic, or now that I've been live for nine months things have settled down and I can expect a similar level of traffic here from now on. But, for contrast, I decided to scan a static (relatively unchanging) website—www.conman.org (for the same time period as my online journal/weblog):
| Date of log | Googlebot hits | Google referers | Comments |
|---|---|---|---|
| October 2001 | 185 | 286 | blog went live 10/22 |
| November 2001 | 275 | 301 | |
| December 2001 | 435 | 395 | |
| January 2002 | 279 | 370 | |
| February 2002 | 74 | 462 | something wrong with Googlebot? |
| March 2002 | 226 | 393 | |
| April 2002 | 226 | 307 | |
| May 2002 | 382 | 358 | |
| June 2002 | 540 | 293 | |
| July 2002 | 215 | 285 | incomplete month |
You can see here that the level of traffic from Google searches is pretty constant, although the Googlebot seems to go up and down. It is apparent though, that something was up with Googlebot in February as visits from it dropped dramatically for that month (and I'm only saying for those two months—I haven't actually checked any of the other sites I host).
And after all this checking, I still don't have a difinitive answer
for Marcus as to why Google has slacked off his site. My own experience is
that Google likes conman.org—part of that might be the stableness of
the URLs on all parts of conman.org (my personal site, www.conman.org/people/spc/ used
to be hosted elsewhere, but when I first moved it to conman.org in October of 98, I placed
permanent redirects from the old site to conman.org so the engines
at that time immediately found my new site) and there's something to be said
for stability. It might also like my online journal/weblog (but Google
seems to have an afinity for those in general). I'm not sure what to tell
Marcus though.
