First, how about a chart:

That’s the number of visits to the site over the past year. I’ll do another version of that chart further below and call out what caused some of those spikes. But some key takeaways:

• Visits: 3,250,000
• Pageviews: 5,200,000
• Average Time On Site: 1 minute, 23 seconds
• Percent Of New Visitors: 71

How are people getting to us? Another chart:

To recap those for the picture challenged:

• Referring Sites: 53%
• Search Engines: 28%
• Direct Visits: 18%

Time to drill down. I’ll give you a table, which I’m going to resort later in various ways:

Digg by far leaves all the other referring sites in the dust. But how do all those Digg visitors measure up, in terms of engagement? I’ve bolded in each column the three sites that lead for that particular metric. In terms of pages viewed, most from Digg only read a single page. In comparison, those from Eric Ward, our own Search Marketing Expo blog, and the New York Times read nearly three pages during a visit to Search Engine Land.

Pages viewed aren’t the entire story, of course. A page view means someone loaded a page, but did they spend much time actually reading it? The stats say most Digg visitors did not, which doesn’t surprise me given the comments you often see on Digg, where it seems like people are only reacting to a story as summarized, rather than properly reading it. Digg visitors were fourth for spending the least amount of time on the site. In contrast, visitors from Eric Ward led by spending over 4 1/2 minutes here, on average. Visitors from my Daily SearchCast podcast site spend nearly as long, with those from our Search Marketing Expo site spending nearly 4 minutes.

I’m especially proud to note that visitors from our own social media site – Sphinn — spent nearly three minutes when they came to an article at Search Engine Land. Three minutes, versus about 18 seconds for a Digg visitor. Search marketers have taken plenty a bad rap by some at Digg. At least the stats give some indication that search marketers are a thoughtful, considerate bunch that actually take the time to read articles before commenting.

Digg is NOT the site with the most newest visitors to Search Engine Land, though it is fairly high. Instead, those are two political blogs, no doubt having people come to view our story about George W. Bush no longer being a miserable failure on Google.

Now some problems with the chart above. Mainly, it’s that it considers all "referring" sites to be the same. In reality, there are these general classes of sites:

• Social Media: You get traffic from people sharing your content with others.
   
• Feed readers: These are generally your existing readers who see that you’ve posted something through a feed on their personalized home page or start page and click through.
   
• News Sites: Places where you generally go to find news.
   
• Topic Sites: These are web sites about particular topics. For us, generally sites about search.

How do they break down in terms of our traffic? Social media:

The feed reading sites:

The news sites:

The topic sites:

Now to summarize, I’m leaving off the feed reading sites. As I explained, these are pretty much people who already know about new content on our site through feeds or email we send them. That’s super important, but it’s not quite the same thing as a referral from another sites. The percentage breakdown of referrals:

• Social media: 79 percent
• Topic sites: 13 percent
• News sites: 8 percent

Short story? There’s a lot of gold in those social media sites. Sure, we might joke about making top 9 lists to please the audiences there or consider carefully the headlines we put on stories to appeal to the social media crowd. And we can say the audience isn’t as engaged. But the sheer amount of traffic they can send can’t be ignored. For more on that, I’ll give you this short reading list:

• Categorizing Social Media Sites
• Social Media Marketing: The New SEO?
• Beyond Google: Social Media Engines First, Other Search Engines Second

Also see Search Engine Land’s Social Media Marketing category and Let’s Get Social column and for past articles. Don’t forget — our SMX Social Media show also returns in April 2008 to help people get up to speed on social media marketing.

How about search engines, what this entire site is about? As I blogged early on last year, the biggest struggle Search Engine Land has had with search engines is being a new "untrusted" site. As someone who ran a "trusted" domain with a 10 year history, I know that virtually anything I posted about a topic at that site could do well over other sites, similar to what we just posted about today hitting Google. But a new site? Sadly, the authority of authorship from an old site doesn’t get passed along to your new domain.

Here’s what I said about the challenge back in January 2007:

Wait a minute! Did I say miserable failure! Wasn’t there something in the news about that again recently? Oh, yeah — in fact, it was our top story last month, as you might recall. And so what happens on Google if I do that search?

Our story isn’t in the first results. WebProNews, which mentions the story, makes it to the second page. Search Engine Guide and Search Engine Lowdown, with really short fresh stories on the subject, also make it to that page. But our comprehensive piece? Nah — we’re invisible.

Keep going through the results, and you’ll find other pages that mention our article, including Boing Boing or our listing on Digg:

But us? Not in the top 100 listings.

Sigh. It’s stuff like this that makes Google sound like a mockery when they suggest there is no "sandbox" or "sandbox-like effect" that holds new sites back. Clearly from our experience, there is. It’s easy to find many searches like the ones above, where other sites that reference our own content outrank that content. It makes no sense, nor is it particularly relevant.

I know it will change, and I’ll patiently wait while we build up our trust – though c’mon, just how many trusted links do they want? We’ve got plenty so far! I’m also increasing our domain registration from the initial year I did to 10 years, which just might possibly make Google think we’re going to be around and are a tiny bit more trustworthy.

It has gotten better since then:

That’s a chart of all our search-related traffic over the past year, and you can see it has climbed. We probably get around 2,000 to 4,000 visits per day from search now, versus the 500 to 800 per day back last January. Those two big spikes, by the way, are due to traffic from searches on fires in Southern California and people looking for how to track Santa Claus. I’ll come back to those in a bit.

Who sends the traffic? Here you go:

I look at those stats, with Google being so far beyond everyone else, and all the things I said last January seem still perfectly applicable:

Why’s TechCrunch doing so well on Google and not the other major search engines? It could be that TechCrunch is optimized best for Google and missing out on the other major search players. But c’mon. search marketers know that the major search engines don’t have that many differences in how they rank pages. Yes, maybe if you load your URLs up with keywords, you might do a bit better at Microsoft Live.com. Perhaps if you do paid inclusion, you might see more traffic flowing from Yahoo. But a page that does well with Google generally should have as good a chance at doing well with the others.

Another caveat is that TechCrunch is probably getting Google News and Google Blog Search traffic mixed in with the overall "organic" figures (see this recent stats post I did about Search Engine Land traffic sources to understand this more). Sure, including those sources as part of Google searches overall could help make Google seem an even bigger resource. But the reality is that many sites constantly report that Google is by far the search traffic leader.

Rich Skrenta’s post Google’s true search market share is 70% back in December was a great call to renew attention about this fact. My own post after his, Google By Far The Leader, If You Look At Site Owner Traffic Stats, provides some further perspective. Overall, it’s hard not to feel that the other major search engines aren’t major traffic drivers, despite the shares of searches they generate. Certainly the stats I’ve been doing for Search Engine Land keep reflecting this.

Search Engine Land is a Google News & Yahoo News source (for the record, we had to request inclusion in both places like everyone else — it wasn’t automatically done, and we got in at both places after about a month). I know that keyword-based searches from Google News are no doubt fueling the Google pool. But it’s still amazing to see someone like Yahoo – with supposedly around half the share of Google in terms of search activity — still so far behind.

Top terms?

That’s nearly 1 million visits to the site through search. Absolutely – social media is a traffic driver that can’t be ignored. But so is search. Just a little care of basic things — title tags, ensuring you can be crawled, and so on – and there’s a continual stream of traffic that can flow your way.

In particular, note the "Other" line at the bottom. In 2007, there were nearly 300,000 different search terms that sent traffic. Over 80 percent of search related traffic was NOT from the top 15 terms. That’s search’s long tail in action (see Screaming About The Search Tail for more about this).

Leaving behind web visits, how are things on the feed front? Here’s the chart:

We currently stand at 18,333 subscribers as of January 1, 2008. That’s down due to the holidays. Our high about two weeks ago was 19,948 — just shy of hitting the 20,000 mark.

Some readers may recall I had a goal to hit 15,000 by the end of the year. I made it with lots to spare! Actually, I have to revise that goal to around 18,000. See that big spike on the chart? That was when Google Reader stats started getting reported to FeedBurner for the first time for all sites across the web. For us, it immediately gave us about 3,000 more subscribers. I did make the goal in the end, and even with a bit to spare. For 2008? I’d like to hit 40,000 or more.

By the way, some will recall that Google Reader and iGoogle themselves are reporting direct stats, plus you can get them from places like Bloglines. More about this can be found in the articles below:

• How Feedburner Adds Up Subscriber Numbers
• Google Reader Now Reporting Subscriber Figures

Figures for us, as of January 2, 2008:

• Bloglines subscribers: 1,814
• iGoogle subscribers: 1,629
• Google Reader subscribers: 6,180

And the feed reader breakdown from FeedBurner for the last month:

As always, we appreciate those who subscribe to our feeds. You’ll find a full list of our feeds here, and here are the buttons for our main feed, to help you along:

Get Our Search Feed:

You can also can get special pages or tabs for many internet start pages that list headlines from us and other search news sources. Check them out below:

• iGoogle Search News Tab
• My Yahoo Search News Page
• Windows Live Search News Page
• Netvibes Search News Tab
• Pageflakes Search News Page

If you want yet more ways to keep up with us, try these options:

• Facebook: Our Search News App
• Facebook: Search Engine Land Page
• Facebook: Search Engine Land Group
• Twitter: Search Engine Land Feed

What about good old email?

• 5,250 readers take our SearchCap newsletter via email. My goal was to be at 17,500 at this point, so I have some revising to do. I’ll aim for hitting 15,000 by the end of this year. Honestly, we think there’s no better way to get a full recap of everything that happened in search than to take SearchCap. Check it out, via email or feed.
   
• 2,800 readers take our Search Month newsletter.
   
• 100% Organic is our most popular column in terms of email subscriptions, with about 600 readers. Many more read it through visits to the site directly. Link Week is at 450, and all but one of our columns has more than 200 email subscribers.

What are people reading when they get here? Search Engine Land’s Most Popular Stories Of 2007 has our top read stories of the past year with descriptions, and here they are in summary:

1. Google Kills Bush’s Miserable Failure Search & Other Google Bombs
2. Google 2.0: Google Universal Search
3. Mapping The Southern California Fires
4. Google Universal Search Means Looking For Raccoons Is No Longer Family Friendly
5. Billboard Showdown: Google 411 Takes On Ask’s Algorithm
6. Google Declares Stephen Colbert As Greatest Living American
7. George W. Bush: A Failure Once Again, According To Google
8. Google Maps Causes US Navy To Change Its Swastika Building
9. Goodbye Froogle, Hello Google Product Search!
10. Google Birthday Logo: Nine Years Old
11. Google Maps Adds Terrain View, Replaces Hybrid View
12. Ask Relaunches: Now "Ask 3D"
13. Larryos, Raisin Brin, Porn Flakes & Other Google Cereals
14. Google Search History Expands, Becomes Web History
15. Gphone? The Google Phone Timeline
16. The Right Way To Fix Inaccurate Wikipedia Articles
17. Google’s New Navigational Links: An Illustrated Guide
18. Official: Selling Paid Links Can Hurt Your PageRank Or Rankings On Google
19. iGoogle, Personalized Search And You
20. Google Releases New Link Reporting Tools
21. Google Says Stephen Colbert Is No Longer The Greatest Living American
22. Instructions On Tracking Santa With NORAD & Google: The 2007 Edition
23. What Is Google PageRank? A Guide For Searchers & Webmasters
24. Wikipedia Enters Top Ten Most Visited Sites
25. How To Win Friends And Influence People In Social News Networks

That brings me back to the traffic chart. How’s it look in terms of the spikes? Let’s see:

1. 14 "Is Google Evil?" Tipping Points Since 2001 (hit Digg and Reddit)
2. Google Kills Bush’s Miserable Failure Search & Other Google Bombs (hit Digg, though over time, Google has sent seven times more traffic)
3. Google Releases New Link Reporting Tools (hit Digg, delicious)
4. Netvibes: Will Google Remain ‘The Start Page For The Internet’? (hit Digg)
5. Squeezing The Search Loaf: Finding Search Engine Freshness & Crawl Dates (hit Digg)
6. George W. Bush: A Failure Once Again, According To Google (hit Digg, Reddit, Stumbleupon, Netscape)
7. Google Declares Stephen Colbert As Greatest Living American (hit Digg, Crooks and Liars, Stumbleupon)
8. Goodbye Froogle, Hello Google Product Search! (hit Digg, also high traffic from TechCrunch)
9. Google Says Stephen Colbert Is No Longer The Greatest Living American (hit Digg)
10. Google 2.0: Google Universal Search (hit Digg, and over time, Google’s sent nearly half as much traffic)
11. Ask Relaunches: Now "Ask 3D" (hit Digg)
12. Google Bad On Privacy? Maybe It’s Privacy International’s Report That Sucks (hit Digg)
13. Google Universal Search Means Looking For Raccoons Is No Longer Family Friendly (hit Digg)
14. The Right Way To Fix Inaccurate Wikipedia Articles (hit Digg)
15. How To Win Friends And Influence People In Social News Networks (hit Digg)
16. Larryos, Raisin Brin, Porn Flakes & Other Google Cereals (hit Digg)
17. Google Birthday Logo: Nine Years Old (hit Digg – and number 18 below was on same day)
18. Google Maps Causes US Navy To Change Its Swastika Building (Yahoo Tech, Clicked, then StumbleUpon has sent Digg-level traffic over several months)
19. Billboard Showdown: Google 411 Takes On Ask’s Algorithm (hit Digg, StumbleUpon)
20. Mapping The Southern California Fires (Google News, Planet Chiropractic)
21. The Social Media Manual: Read Before You Play (hit Digg)
22. Google Maps Adds Terrain View, Replaces Hybrid View (hit Digg)
23. Instructions On Tracking Santa With NORAD & Google: The 2007 Edition (Google News)
24. Keeping It Private On Google Reader (hit Digg)
25. Deconstructing Google: Chapter 4, After The Google Breakup (hit Digg)

Sometimes I look at the list of top stories and sort of want to sigh. You pour your heart, soul, and energy into a long write-up on some important subject that perhaps few will notice. Then a reader emails you about an image of a dog and a raccoon apparently getting it on — which shows up in regular Google search results — and that’s one of the top stories of the year?

Mostly, I don’t worry or try to measure if a story did well based on immediate views (or total views at all). Especially over time, some stories pick up legs. In fact, I wanted to somehow make a list of the top articles that were NOT driven by social media traffic, but that proved too hard to do quickly. But from the top 25 for the entire year, here are ones that did well without social media love:

1. Google Search History Expands, Becomes Web History
2. Gphone? The Google Phone Timeline
3. Google’s New Navigational Links: An Illustrated Guide
4. Official: Selling Paid Links Can Hurt Your PageRank Or Rankings On Google
5. iGoogle, Personalized Search And You
6. Google Releases New Link Reporting Tools
7. What Is Google PageRank? A Guide For Searchers & Webmasters
8. Wikipedia Enters Top Ten Most Visited Sites

Finally, I’ll wrap up our year with some of the recognitions we’ve earned. These are also listed in the bragroll on the site:

• Wall Street Journal Recommended Reading
• Ad Age Power 150 Blog (currently fourth, though on a points shown basis, we’re tied with four others for first)
• Technorati Top 100 Blog (currently 37th)
• TopRank Top 10
• Self Made Minds Top 100
• Larry Chase Top Pick
• SEJ’s Top 2 & 3 SEO Bloggers (and fingers crossed for this year’s awards)
• Best SEM Newsletter
• eBizMBA Top Tech Site, Blog & SEO Blog
• Daily Blog Tips Top 25 SEO Blogs
• Top 50 Marketing Blog To Watch In 2008
• Techmeme Leaderboard Source

Thank you everyone for your support of Search Engine Land over the past year, from our dedicated writers, to our editors, to our sales and technical staff, to our readers that we love to serve!

For January 2007, we had about 194,000 page views, or about 6,250 page views per day. Those are actually "AdViews," the number of times ads were shown as reported by our ad serving software. Overall, our views went up 109 percent from the previous month.

Our Google Analytics reports gave us higher figures: 227,000 page views for the month, with 141,000 visitors. It’s not uncommon for different metrics programs to give slightly different figures, and we use the ad server for our official ones. But Google Analytics is what we use to do the marketing breakdown on where our traffic is coming from, which I’ll get into more below.

No Miserable Failure With Digg

Let’s do the pretty pictures. This was the traffic in January 2007:

The two big spikes you see come from Digg. Early in the month, my 14 "Is Google Evil?" Tipping Points Since 2001 article hit the site’s home page, bringing in the traffic. However, that was nothing compared to later in the month when my Google Kills Bush’s Miserable Failure Search & Other Google Bombs article became popular on Digg. That was our fourth story to be popular on Digg. It eclipsed all the others and gave us our busiest day of the year.

How about another pretty chart? This is ALL traffic to the site since we went live back in November, ahead of our official mid-December launch:

The other spikes also come from past Diggs, as I explained in the report for December. But as I also said then:

Problogger had a nice look recently at how Digg spikes can help build a traffic up over time. That will be great if it happens here. However, that’s not what I’m building Search Engine Land upon.

I don’t want Digg to be my primary traffic driver any more than I want to have a site completely dependent on Google sending traffic. A single source simply leaves you vulnerable if something goes wrong with that source. More and more sites are reporting that they’ve been banned from Digg, for example. That’s dangerous for a new site, if their traffic strategy is all about Digg.

So for me, Digg traffic is a nice surprise, the frosting on the cake — but I’m baking a cake with many traffic source ingredients. I’m successful if the overall line between the spikes continues to rise.

Indeed, the spikes I’m most interested in are the little mid-week ones. Traffic to the site is typically highest on a Tuesday or Wednesday. I want to continue seeing each midweek non-Digg spike get larger. And that’s generally been the trend, making me happy.

Traffic Drivers

So what sent traffic to Search Engine Land in January? We had 2,440 traffic referral sources, double the number in December. Here were the top 25:

Top Stories & "Numbered" Articles

To cover some of the traffic sources in more depth, I thought it would be interesting to look at the top five stories posted in January on the site (our latest Search Month has the top ten). Those were, in order of popularity by unique page views:

1. Google Kills Bush’s Miserable Failure Search & Other Google Bombs (22,999 views)
2. 14 "Is Google Evil?" Tipping Points Since 2001 (9,712 views)
3. 25 Tips To Optimize Your Blog For Readers & Search Engines (8,245 views)
4. 10 Google Feeds You Should Subscribe To (2,960 views)
5. 2007 Guide To Linkbaiting: The Year Of Widgetbait? (2,575 views)

Notice that three of the stories are what I call "number stories," where the headline begins with the number of tips or nuggets in the article. I’ve had a good chuckle about this to myself over the past month. More and more, I’m aware of the need to see if stories can be put into a format of bullet points or "number of tips" format that seems so popular for the social media sites crowds.

When I first started writing for newspapers, USA Today has just launched, causing a "news you can use" revolution that freaked many newspapers writers out. I seem to recall that USA Today even spent a lot of time and money researching the best bullet point style to use (the little delta or arrow symbol is what came out), an effort that opened them up to further mockery. Many at other papers didn’t want to write dumbed-down bite-size articles that ignored the "serious" news, as they felt USA Today was doing.

Similarly, part of me wants to ignore the tastes of the social media crowd. But realistically — why not? None of our "numbered" articles are dumbed-down or bite-size in anyway. But if putting the headlines in a "number" style makes them more attractive to a growing new audience, then it’s something to consider.

Stories & Traffic

Now to the breakdown by story:

• Google Kills Bush’s Miserable Failure Search & Other Google Bombs: Digg was the big driver, about 8,500 visits. Direct navigation came in at about 2,100, followed by a Boing Boing mention sending 1,700 visits. I thought it would be a story right up their alley, so I used the submit page. Google’s Matt Cutts sent another 1,700 visitors. We’d talked about the change so I could do the story, and he linked to my article from his blog. The man’s a traffic powerhouse, as I’ve written before. Then Fark sent 1,400 people, and The Inquirer shot another 1,100 our way, followed by Techmeme at 910. To understand Techmeme better, see my Q&A With Gabe Rivera, Creator Of Techmeme post from last month.
   
• 14 "Is Google Evil?" Tipping Points Since 2001: Digg was again the big driver, about4,400 visits. Next up was Reddit, sending about 900 visits. Direct navigation came in at 800 visits, then Techmeme sent 567 and Del.icio.us sent 435.
   
• 25 Tips To Optimize Your Blog For Readers & Search Engines: I covered traffic from this story in depth in my Search Engine Land: Top Stories & Stats, Jan. 10, 2007 post. At the time, it got hot by doing well with Del.icio.us. But later in the month, it hit StumbleUpon. The traffic kept rising and rising to make StumbleUpon the second largest referral source, 1,150 visits, just after direct navigation at 1,400. Jennifer Slegg who wrote the article was the fourth biggest driver, via a link from her own traffic power house blog, JenSense.

  StumbleUpon is one of the most overlooked social media search engines, in my view. A self-submission, which takes all of 30 seconds, can easily send you 50 to 100 visits. If the story gets hot, hang on!

  Watching StumbleUpon send me traffic was one inspiration for my Beyond Google: Social Media Engines First, Other Search Engines Second post. It was a wake-up call attempt that you’ve got to consider social media search engines right alongside the major general purpose search engines. Also, be sure to check out Build Super Links and Traffic With StumbleUpon from Loren Baker over at Search Engine Journal. I kept nodding my head as he described his experiences, since I’ve seen the same thing. Lots of useful tips, there.
   

• 10 Google Feeds You Should Subscribe To: This sort of broke my heart, given that it seemed like a perfect story to go popular on Digg. It didn’t, but after direct navigation with 475 visits, Digg was the next biggest driver at 340. The lesson here is that even if you don’t make it big on Digg, being small can still send a healthy chunk of traffic. Those reading feeds via Google came next, 320 visits. StumbleUpon sent 275 and Techmeme sent 230.
   
• 2007 Guide To Linkbaiting: The Year Of Widgetbait?: Direct navigation was by far the leader here, sending 700 visits. It stresses why feeds and email lists are so important. Your own site, don’t forget, is also traffic driver. If someone subscribes to your feed or an email newsletter, you can reach out to them and keep them informed about new content. That brings them back more easily. Another 220 visitors came via feed read at Google.

Feeds, Feed Traffic & Email

As I said in last month’s report, getting visitors to subscribe to one of our feeds or an email newsletter is my primary goal with the site. If visitors do either, then I have the ability to continue my relationship with them more easily over time. Let’s see how it’s going, starting with our main site feed:

The chart above shows subscriptions over time, and the number keeps rising. We kicked above the 3,000 mark at the end of January. That was about a 1,000 subscriber gain from the month before. My goal is 15,000 subscribers by the end of this year, as I covered before. If growth keeps up, we’re well on our way.

Here’s the look at how people are coming to us via the main feed:

As for our newsletters, the SearchCap daily newsletter grew from 1,600 email readers to 2,500. Hurray! The Search Month monthly newsletter, in contrast, stayed at about the same 700 reader level. Ugh!

Part of the problem here is that because we use FeedBurner to send email newsletters, it’s difficult to promote both lists at once. That will change when we take our lists in-house in a few weeks. It’ll be interesting to see if Search Month readership then picks up.

Google News & Browse Decline

Last month, I noted how we’d been added to Google News and that this was sending us a ton of traffic. In particular, "browse" traffic from Google News (when you show up on Google News pages when people browse stories, rather than keyword search) sent over 1,200 visits. That plunged to 600 in January.

What’s up? No idea. However, I heard from another site also in Google News

that over the past weeks, they’ve also seen a plunge in Google News browse traffic. I’ll keep an eye on it. I also have a story on Google News that I’m working up hopefully for next week.

Search Traffic

Now time to revisit how things are going with the search engines. These are the top terms that sent us traffic in January:

Oddities in there, I know. Why "101 top stories in search 2006 sullivan" comes up in 145 queries is a mystery to me, too. The same is true for "site:searchengineland.com zawodny."

Aside from oddities, I’ve posted previously about how sad our query stream is, with the site name being the top driver of traffic. So far, things haven’t changed. All that traffic for "google?" That’s coming off of Google News. That search traffic for "sex." Google Blog Search (which is why the traffic is so low!). Most of these top terms are not being fueled out of ordinary web search.

Why not? Two reasons. First, we’re still building trust with the largest search engine, Google. I’ve covered this before, on how many of our articles are simply not ranking well in Google because we aren’t trusted enough yet. How about some illustrations?

Since we’re talking about trust, how about Eric Ward’s column here called Are You In The Circle Of Link Trust? You’d expect us to rank well for that, right? Let’s see:

Oh, too bad. For that search, we’re ranked 16th. That’s actually progress. In the past, some queries where we should totally rank put us nowhere in the top 100 at all.

Going back to that query, while I know we have to earn trust with Google, it’s easy to mock them. For example, we have the source article, and they bury it on the second page. Instead, coming above it are 3 other articles that simply refer to it (Techmeme, The Daily SearchCast & Search Engine Guide).

FYI, this isn’t a new issue with Google. "Googlewashing" like this has been complained about since 2003. It was a key part of my 2004 article on the miserable failure search.

Wait a minute! Did I say miserable failure! Wasn’t there something in the news about that again recently? Oh, yeah — in fact, it was our top story last month, as you might recall. And so what happens on Google if I do that search?

Our story isn’t in the first results. WebProNews, which mentions the story, makes it to the second page. Search Engine Guide and Search Engine Lowdown with really short fresh stories on the subject also make it to that page. But our comprehensive piece? Nah — we’re invisible.

Keep going through the results, and you’ll find other pages that mention our article, including Boing Boing or our listing on Digg:

But us? Not in the top 100 listings.

Sigh. It’s stuff like this that makes Google sound like a mockery when they suggest there is no "sandbox" or "sandbox-like effect" that holds new sites back. Clearly from our experience, there is. It’s easy to find many searches like the ones above, where other sites that reference our own content outrank that content. It makes no sense, nor is it particularly relevant.

I know it will change, and I’ll patiently wait while we build up our trust – though c’mon, just how many trusted links do they want? We’ve got plenty so far! I’m also increasing our domain registration from the initial year I did to 10 years, which just might possibly make Google think we’re going to be around and a tiny bit more trustworthy.

Until the trust grows, our top queries will remain coming off of vertical search engines at Google, such as Google News Search and Google Blog Search. But then again, those top terms made up 5,500 of our 16,000 keyword driven traffic – 34 percent, not the majority. Despite not being that trusted, we’re still generating plenty of traffic of the search tail.

To cap off search, who drove the most traffic to us?

1. Google: 15,628 visits
2. Yahoo: 297 visits
3. Ask: 68 visits
4. AOL: 63 visits
5. Microsoft Live: 61 visits

Even for an "untrusted" site, Google’s a powerhouse.

For December 2006, we had about 93,000 page views, or about 4,400 page views per day. Actually, those are "AdViews," the number of times ads were shown as reported by our ad serving software. We only began showing ads from December 11 onward, so I have to turn to our Google Analytics statistics to talk about the entire month. Let’s dive into them starting with a chart:

The chart shows you the overall trend of visits and page views for the month of December. Note that for the first two days after we launched, December 12 and 13, we have no stats or minimal ones because our stats tracking code was accidentally left off as we brought the new web design up.

Overall, we had about 135,000 page views for the month, conservatively rounding up for the missing days — or about 4,400 page views per day, matching what our ad server reports. Visits were about 85,000 for the month or about 2,700 per day.

Digg Spikes

The two big spikes are traffic from Digg. I already covered the first time we hit Digg in December. The second time was for my story on the disappearing sex blogs at Google. FYI, we also hit Digg a third time just after the New Year, for my 14 "Is Google Evil?" Tipping Points Since 2001 article. That also resulted in a big traffic spike.

There’s no denying that Digg is a huge traffic driver, especially for a new site. Search Engine Watch, my alma mater, was Digged occasionally. Given the huge traffic it received from other sources, Digg made a spike but nowhere as high in proportion as I see with Search Engine Land.

That’s something I want to correct, of course. Problogger had a nice look recently at how Digg spikes can help build a traffic up over time. That will be great if it happens here. However, that’s not what I’m building Search Engine Land upon.

I don’t want Digg to be my primary traffic driver any more than I want to have a site completely dependent on Google sending traffic. A single source simply leaves you vulnerable if something goes wrong with that source. More and more sites are reporting that they’ve been banned from Digg, for example. That’s dangerous for a new site, if their traffic strategy is all about Digg.

So for me, Digg traffic is a nice surprise, the frosting on the cake — but I’m baking a cake with many traffic source ingredients. I’m successful if the overall line between the spikes continues to rise.

Traffic Drivers

Of course, December was a tough month to look at traffic patterns. Many people aren’t online as much during the holiday period, at least for a "work blog" like ourselves. In addition, we didn’t formally launch the site until December 11. January will be our first real "normal" month.

Still, there’s plenty to learn from December. What were those other ingredients in the traffic cake? We had 1,417 overall traffic referral sources. Here were the top 25:

There were some big differences from my preview of December stats just after we launched. Digg, I’ve already covered. Direct Navigation I didn’t mention before, because I’d used a slightly different chart from Google Analytics, Referral Conversion. That shows all the traffic where there’s a known referral source as reported by your browser (IE, the browser tells your web server the last place it came from). Instead, the chart above is the Source Conversion report. That shows all sources sending you traffic — referral links, search engine traffic plus direct navigation.

Direct Navigation From Press Mentions?

One thing I was curious about with Direct Navigation was whether press mentions made any spikes. I get a lot of calls from the press. Some of them result in quotes and mentions of the site. Typically, these online mentions won’t have direct links. But does having the name of the site out there alone generate more visits?

One recent article I remember was USA Today looking at Google’s traffic. That came out on December 28, so potentially I should have seen a rise. And the chart says?

Indeed, there was a spike. Direct Navigation sent 806 visitors on the 27th, the day before the article. That dropped to 682 ,the day of the article. Then it leapt to 1,536 the day after it ran (and 940 on Saturday, December 30).

So there’s your proof. Press mentions do pay off, even without links. Well, maybe. Why didn’t the traffic go up on the day of the article? One reason could be that the story also hit the wire services, so it might have made it into other papers over time. Plus, people might not have gone online to check out the site until after reading it.

Also complicating things is the fact the Direct Navigation spike came around the time both Digg and Boing Boing sent a lot of traffic. That spike might be due to people simply hearing about the site from these sources and visiting it directly, perhaps after an initial visit.

Going forward, I’m going to watch Direct Navigation traffic more closely after a press mention, to see if I can pin that down more definitively.

Our third big driver of traffic, searches on Google, I’ll deal with separately below. Similarly, I’ll deal with Google Reader and other feed reading services in a section on feeds.

Drill Down On Traffic Sources

Boing Boing was a new traffic driver for us, all related to the sex blogger story. I think there’s also a lesson here on how traffic can result because of an active participation in your community, as well.

The sex blog story hit when I was off for Christmas. When I’m gone, I usually take a day upon returning just to dig out and catch up on things that are going. Then for a big, complicated story, I want to spend more time trying to look at what’s happening rather than just blogging away.

I’d seen the sex blog story as part of my regular review, when I got back. It kept growing and growing until it hit Boing Boing. I reviewed that story, and I couldn’t help but feel that Google deserved some more credit than it was getting. I dropped an email over to Xeni Jardin, who I’d talked with last year several times about Google issues. Could she add a postscript with some of my comments? I thought they’d help provide some balance.

Xeni did (thanks, Xeni!). And there was even a link, which started driving traffic. But getting a link wasn’t my prime motivation. Trying to get some balance and information out was. I routinely comment on blogs or email people on issues relating to search. I put a considerable amount of time into it, actually. I do this because I’m passionate about the space. But a side benefit is that occasionally, that type of sharing gets returned as people link to you.

I went on and then did my own story on the topic. It was a long look at the sites involved and some of the issues. This type of original content is both my chief goal for Search Engine Land and for myself personally. I know we do a lot of referring to what others are writing about. That’s not going away. People write great stuff, and I want my audience to know about that whatever the source. But I personally find nothing better than being able to roll up my sleeves and dive into a story to try and make sense of it for others.

The story resulted in a second Boing Boing mention — plus it also got Digged. Lesson? Good content gets rewarded, something I’ve talked about since I started writing about search engines back in 1996.

Now what’s that The Daily that sent so much traffic? Pretty simple. My guess is that whoever runs it noted that I was listing all my referral sources when I did my stats preview and figured if they could send me enough traffic, they’d get listed. You did.

The Daily has a number of start pages. Perhaps you’d like to see a different woman in a bikini each day. Here you go. And right at the top, there are three links. For a period in December, we were one of those three links. Hey, it’s not all about bikinis. You can also see a different scenic shot each day, or a different animal or just a page of links. But yeah, it’s the bikini page that seems most popular. Of the 2,200 visits from the site, 74 percent came from the bikini page, followed by 19 percent from the scenic page, then the rest from others.

Planet Internet was another traffic driver. This came off a news story over there, referencing my The Lies Of Top Search Terms Of The Year article. Again, good content (well, I thought it was good) can bring in the traffic.

In my preview, I’d already mentioned how Search Engine Watch was one of the top referring sources to Search Engine Land. That remained the case, as the month ended. From the SEW Blog, about half the traffic (47 percent) came from my going away post, with another 17 percent from Elisabeth Osmeloski’s best wishes post. With the going away time now over, I’d expect that traffic to drop. FYI, Daggle, Search Engine Roundtable, Google Blogoscoped and Search Engine Guide sent traffic primarily based on the site launch.

A more typical "spike" from Search Engine Watch would likely be the 148 visitors referred our way from a post about our article on Google Patent Search, for example. And that’s another lesson about original content. If we’re not providing something new, we aren’t going to get the referral traffic. Rest assured, original content will continue to grow. That article was also the top traffic driver for us from ResourceShelf.

Several other search engine blogs I’d noted in my preview still made the top list. Threadwatchers especially loved the news of our SMX search marketing conference happening this June, judging on clickthrough from the site. SEOmoz sent a bunch of traffic, but because of the way Google Analytics drops the ?ID= portion of SEOmoz’s URLs, I can’t tell what particular topics drew interest. Grrr — stop that, Google Analytics! I’ll do a post on this in more depth in the future. The same problem means I can’t tell what Search Engine Journal readers liked.

John Battelle’s SearchMob — a Digg for search stories — showed some legs, with a post there about me sharing site stats sending along 61 visitors. Most traffic from SerachBlog seemed related to the quick news we posted on the Yahoo reorganization. That story also sent traffic from Scripting.com.

Our post no real original content. But I had the release up from what Yahoo emailed me faster than I think Yahoo itself got it into a HTML form that people could link to, plus I quickly added links to more commentary. While original content is key, covering key search news even if briefly is part of our mission — and that, too, can pay off.

Finally, I’ve only listed the top 25 traffic sources. Remember, I said there were 1,400 in all. The other 1,375 collectively drove about 15,000 visits. There’s a long tail to referral traffic, just as there is with search traffic. As a new site owner, I deeply appreciate those links and references from any site, even if they aren’t in the top 25.

Feeds, Feed Traffic & Email

Search Engine Land offers a variety of feeds and email newsletters, as covered here. Getting visitors to subscribe to one of our feeds or an email newsletter is my primary goal with the site. If visitors do either, then I have the ability to continue my relationship with them more easily over time. How’s the relationship building going? Let’s do some charts:

That’s the subscribers to the main Search Engine Land feed since it was offered when the placeholder site went up back in November. The stats are as reported by FeedBurner. Unfortunately, I can’t narrow it down to just the month of December. It’s either one day, last 30 days or all time — so I thought I’d kick off with the all time view.

Overall, the feed is showing a pattern I want to see, spikes each week that keep getting higher. It plateaus a bit during the holiday period, which is understandable. Fewer people are hitting their feeds then, and subscribers only register as they make an active call on their feeds.

Over at Search Engine Watch, our feeds grew to hit the 15,000 level over time. So that’s my goal with Search Engine Land, hit at least that level or try to go past it. I know there’s at least that many people interested in search news on a regular basis.

(FYI, any Search Engine Watch stats I mention here or going forward are all in the public record, things that have been reported on Search Engine Watch in the past or currently. So I’m not passing along anything confidential, in case you were wondering).

When do I want to hit 15,000? Now! In fact, Philipp Lenssen of Google Blogoscoped kind of wonders why we aren’t already at that level, in a comment he made on an earlier post:

I was figuring you had loads of traffic already with most SEW readers converting to SEL?

The reality is that Search Engine Land is new, habits are hard and readership is broad. This site has a lot of goodwill from the community, but it still has to prove itself over time as deserving a larger readership beyond just the core search community. In addition, it’s one thing to tell people you’ve moved and another thing for a chunk of the audience to make the actual effort to add a new feed.

In short, Search Engine Land is very much an underdog. And that’s fine – I’ve always liked underdogs. My goal has always been to hit that 15,000 level not in the first month but by the end of the first year.

By the way, I mentioned a "core" search audience. Look back at the feed, and you’ll see how it quickly spikes up to the 1,500 level. I think that may be the hard-core search audience that’s out there, the influencers. Or maybe it’s just 1,500 people who like me and the others here on Search Engine Land!

Where are these people coming from? FeedBurner breaks them down like this:

I’ve condensed it a bit and removed the somewhat confusing "reach" figure (it was 1,460). Bloglines is the biggest driver, as you can see — followed by NewsGator and Pageflakes.

Google Analytics tells a different story, but we’ll come back to that. Let’s look at the SearchCap feed, first:

SearchCap is a post we do each day recapping everything that was on the blog. You can take it in feed form, but it’s also offered as an email newsletter. Given its alternative newsletter format, it shows two key differences from the Search Engine Land feed:

• Weekend drops are minimal
• Most people get it via email

Look at the Search Engine Land feed, and you’ll see there’s almost always a midweek rise, then a plummet at the weekend, then a new midweek rise. That mirrors a regular work week, where you tend to have a lot of people online during the week — and most especially in the middle of the week — and offline on the weekend. The feed stats, as I said, reflect feed calls. You only have a "subscriber" if that subscriber issues a call to get your feed.

Newsletters are much different. Once you have a subscriber, that subscriber stays with you every day, even if they are offline. You only lose them if they unsubscribe. So the stats are more regular.

In fact, the drops you see for SearchCap are only due to the relatively few people who take SearchCap by feed. They contribute to the tiny midweek rises. If they weren’t there, SearchCap would be mainly a steady rising line.

Of the roughly 2,000 SearchCap subscribers we have, about 1,600 of those take it via email newsletter. After that, Google Desktop is the next biggest draw, 112 subscribers.

As with the Search Engine Land feed, I also have a goal for SearchCap. That’s to hit 35,000 email readers in the next two years. Over at Search Engine Watch, the daily SearchDay newsletter is around the 35,000 mark in readership. That largely built up over a course of four years, as Chris Sherman took the helm of it back in early 2001. Once that figure was hit, it stayed largely stable over time. That makes me feel there’s a core email newsletter audience of that size. But gaining email subscribers is harder in these days of increasing spam and feed alternatives. Two years might be too optimistic. We’ll see!

That leads me to Search Month. I ran the Search Engine Report monthly newsletter for a decade. Now I’m doing the new Search Month monthly newsletter for Search Engine Land. That takes me from a readership of about 90,000 to 100,000 to a current one of about 700.

Ouch! I don’t know if we’ll ever hit the 100,000 level, something that took Search Engine Watch about five years to do. I’ll go with a more realistic goal of 50,000 over the next three years. One thing that helps is that the first issue is out. Check it out — I think anyone who wants a regular monthly recap of search news will find it useful.

By the way, both SearchCap and Search Month are full-text feeds, unlike the Search Engine Land feed. The main Search Engine Land feed may go full-text as well. There are some issues to consider there, and I’ll explore these more in a future post. But I’m leaning that way for a change in the near-term.

Now back to Google Analytics. Remember my big chart of referral sites above? Here’s the breakdown of sites that are newsreaders or email referral sources:

That combined Google Reader and Google Personalized Home Page figure? Google Analytics actually reports that as "google.com [referral]." But when you drill into it using the Referral Conversion tool, you can see that about 2,600 visitors are coming from Google Reader (google.com/reader/view) and about 1,400 from Google’s Personalized Home Page (google.com/ig).

Both of these are feedreaders. Neither is showing up in my FeedBurner stats to any significant degree. That’s probably down to Google not providing readership stats the way some of the other feedreaders do, but it might also be that FeedBurner needs to make some of its own adjustments. I’ll be checking with both companies and do a follow up in the future.

Also keep in mind that Google Analytics is showing page views, while FeedBurner is showing feed views. A chunk of people might not be loading up our pages, simply reading whatever is in the feeds. FeedBurner can track those people, while Google Analytics is tracking those who come to the site or load content directly from the site.

News Search Traffic

As a news site, Search Engine Land naturally wants to tap into a key vertical search space that’s suitable for us, news search. In my preview, I’d noted how the site had already been picked up by Techmeme. Traffic from there continued on, ending the month with 1,500 visits.

That’s nothing compared to Digg. However, Techmeme is heavily read by influencers, people I know will be linking to us or making mention of our stories. I love being part of it and appreciate the traffic.

Indeed, out of curiosity, I checked my new visitor to returning visitor stats. For Techmeme, about 40 percent of those coming are return visitors. For Digg, that’s about 4 percent. Now in raw numbers, that 746 people from Digg as returning visitors to Techmeme’s 600. So Digg still can produce a net gain, but the audience at Techmeme is clearly much more different and much more in tune with what we’re writing.

In my preview, I also discussed how much I missed being part of Google News. Later in December, when I felt we had enough content to prove our worth, I formally made an inclusion request using the Google News inclusion form. We were added about a week later. In that short period, Google News sent over 1,200 visitors.

FYI, I plan to revisit both Google News and Techmeme from an inclusion standpoint in the near future. So stay tuned.

Keyword-Driven Search Traffic

Now for dessert, search marketing stats. Here are the top terms that drove us traffic in December

As was the case in our preview, our top terms tended to be those relating to our name.

The terms google and goog are mostly driven off of Google. Google Analytics unfortunately doesn’t break down where on Google these are coming from — Google web search, news search, blog search, etc. I hope they’ll change that or make it an option in the future. But from spot checks I recall doing, these seem to be from Google News and Google Blog Search. That underscores the importance of vertical search. Hey, I’d love to rank tops in Google web search for "google." But there’s plenty of traffic for the term in other types of vertical search areas. Don’t neglect those.

You see a bunch of terms relating to tracking Santa. These come mostly off Google web search, from a post I did in December

Another term that leaps out is "search engines." That’s us ranking in the top results for search engines at Ask. I’m used to seeing traffic for that term when I was at Search Engine Watch, since after being a resource for 10 years, the site’s in the top results of Google, Yahoo and Ask for that phrase. I’d obviously considered "search engines" as a key term I’d like Search Engine Land to be found for. However, I didn’t expect this would happen for at least months.

Instead, sometime in December, we hit the first page of results at Ask. Currently, we’re on the second page. I’ll follow up more with Ask about this, because the first thought many may have is that Ask has simply altered the results to get Search Engine Land higher. Alternatively, Ask has long talked about ranking sites not based on all links from across the web but links within a community of sites. In that case, it makes more sense for Search Engine Land to do better, if it has quickly gained enough trusted links from within a relatively small search community.

Just to benchmark, at Google, Yahoo and Microsoft Live, Search Engine Land is not in the top 100 results for that term. Here’s hoping that will change over the next few months. Any link donations to help make it happen are happily received!

In my preview, I talked about how paltry my query stream was. Overall, it’s not gained much, but it’s still early days in the content building business. But then again, don’t forget the search tail. The terms above make up about 3,000 visits, about half the search related traffic. Another 3,000 visits came from the remaining 1,900 or so terms not shown.

Two more issues on the search term analysis. Remember above, I said Google sent search related traffic of 6,172 visits? That’s also precisely the same amount of traffic of ALL search related traffic that search engines have sent, according to Google Analytics. The figures shouldn’t be the same. The figure for ALL traffic should be Google’s traffic plus some of the other search engines, making it at least slightly higher. I suspect that Google Analytics is counting things differently using different reports, and I’ll try to track this down further in the future.

Meanwhile, here’s the breakdown on traffic sent by search engine, according to the ALL search engines report:

1. Google: 5,618 visits
2. Ask: 187 visits
3. AOL: 117 visits
4. Yahoo: 114 visits
5. Live: 10 visits
6. Others: 126 visits

Overall, Google sent 91 percent of our overall keyword driven traffic. For this site, at least, that helps confirm the view of Google being by far the top search engine based on referral traffic.

Top Content

Finally, what did most people read? Here are the top articles:

The time period covers December 1 through 10, before we officially launched. We had some stories up, and some traffic, but I imagine the entire month of December will look much different.

Over the 10 days (including two weekends), we’ve had about 30,000 page views. That’s an average of 3,000 page views per day. We’ve had about 15,000 visits, about 1,500 per day. Thanks for coming by!

As a marketer, I always find referrer information far more fun than visits and page views. Over the period, we had just over 10,000 visits come from referral links:

The biggest difference between the referral traffic I see here and what I saw over at Search Engine Watch is that here, it remains mostly feed driven. Google was a huge driver of SEW traffic. But that was keyword driven, and especially Google News driven. I did a post on Daggle last month, Case Study: Digg Versus Google News Traffic, that gives you a glimpse of that. At Search Engine Land, Google referral traffic (where someone clicks on a link from Google) is far above keyword driven traffic. I’ll come back to this in a bit.

Readers beyond Google are also important. Bloglines is a huge powerhouse, above a place like My Yahoo. That might change when I do some formal submissions to My Yahoo. If you’re seeded as a default choice in My Yahoo, tons of traffic flow. I’ll blog more about this and the entire promotion process I’ll be going through for Search Engine Land. Also a call out to reader Netvibes for kicking us traffic!

As a brand new site, it helps to have friends get you going. My alma mater Search Engine Watch remains the biggest friend, in terms of traffic sent our way. Threadwatch — I remember when it was just a baby itself — is now a referral powerhouse. Rand Fishkin’s SEOmoz has pushed us love, as has John Battelle at SearchBlog, Philipp Lenssen’s Google Blogoscoped, Dave Winer’s Scripting News, the Official Google Webmaster Central Blog, Robert Clough and Jennifer Laycock’s Search Engine Guide, Loren Baker’s Search Engine Journal and Gary Price’s ResourceShelf. Thanks, everyone! We hope to send you it all back and more in the months to come!

A brand new site also benefits if you have other sites that are more mature. My personal blog, my personal consulting site and Barry Schwartz’s Search Engine Roundtable have all contributed. Even the brand new site for Search Engine Land’s publisher, Third Door Media, kicked in some traffic.

I mentioned Google News. We’re not in there yet. I haven’t formally submitted and don’t plan to until later this month, as I will with the other news search engines. I think there are pretty good odds we’ll naturally get added. But we’re brand new, so a period of proving ourselves before allowed into the select group of news sources is totally understandable.

Over at news site Techmeme, Gabe Rivera wasted no time having faith in us. Thanks, Gabe! We were listed there I think as soon as we started posting content, making Techmeme our biggest news search engine traffic source at the moment. Want to be in Techmeme yourself? Gabe gave tips in his How do I get my blog to show up? post that you should check out.

If I love referral data, I love search query data even more. What terms are people using to find the site! It’s really, really sad:

So sad. I’m used to a huge, diverse query stream ranging from lots of traffic for a topic currently in the news to lots of traffic for terms relating to standing content about meta tags or, hmm — search engines. My query stream here is pathetic. We rank for our name!

If I’m doing my job, that’s going to change drastically over the coming months. Our new site should grow to be trusted in the search engines, if we’re getting out quality content that attracts links. Plus, each new article is a new entry point, giving us a longer tail of possible terms to connect on. In fact, beyond what’s shown above, there were about 200 other terms that all drove us traffic. The tail can be very powerful.

FYI, it’s Google that’s our big driver of search-related traffic. Google sent about 800 visits via search terms in the period above, compared to that 1,229 that came off of Google feed reading related links. In comparison, Ask.com sent us 40 search-related visits, then Yahoo 37 visits, AOL 5 and MSN 2.

Hope you enjoyed the glimpse! Let’s see how it looks when the entire month finishes. I want a happy query stream that makes me smile!