Search Engine Land: Top Stories & Stats, Jan. 16, 2007

Time for another

daily stats review, since yesterday was our second busiest ever non-Digg
day. Below a look at the top stories that sent us traffic, along with tips and
suggestions on how you might do the same.

Google No Longer
Linking To Yahoo, MapQuest Maps was our top story, with about 1,000 views.
Most people came from
Techmeme, about 400 in all. Google keyword searches sent about 100 visitors,
with terms like Yahoo and
MapQuest
seeming to send them from Google News. Then smaller chunks of 10-20 visitors
came from places like
The
Only Republican,

Greg Sterling’s blog [who wrote the post and mentioned it there],
Google
Blogoscoped and Jeremy Zawodny.

The takeaway here is two fold. First, listen to your readers. Our post came
out of an email we got from reader Aaron B. Hockley, telling us he spotted the
change and

noted it on his Another Blogger blog. Taking a look at that, then going a
bit further to reconfirm the change and get a comment from Google helped us
develop the story further.

Second, reach out to other blogs. If Aaron hadn’t gotten in contact, we might
not have seen this via him (and provided a link back). But he did, we did, and I
hope new people discovered his blog.

comScore: Google Wins
Again & IE7 Doesn’t Stop Microsoft’s Slide was our second most popular
story, with about 700 views. Techmeme again lead the referral sources. About 170
people came from
there. Google keyword searches sent another 120, from things like
microsoft at
Google News. Google News also sent another 40 from those browsing headlines.
Search Engine Watch
noted our
write-up, which sent another 40 people our way. Dare Obasanjo of
RSS Bandit (my
newsreader)

kicked over another 10 or so people.

SEO Blogs Under Hack
Attack was the third most popular story, with about 500 views. That was
driven from SEO sites, SEOmoz
sending about 35
visits and the

Online Marketing Blog another 10. The bulk of visits came from our own
readers, seeing the story showing up in their feeds or in the
SearchCap newsletter
that we send out.

Study Says Get In Top
5 Not Top 10 & Search Engines May Need To Highlight Official Sites was the
fourth most popular story, with about 400 views. StumbleUpon was a top source,

sending about 50 visits. Search Engine Guide
shot
us another 30. It didn’t make Digg big time, but we’ll take the 10 visits
Digg did send! Bruce
Clay’s blog

sent us another 7 readers.

I had fun doing this story. Often you read about studies briefly, but people
don’t dive deep and read into them. Instead, they’ll write about whatever the
key points are that are being highlighted by the authors. With this study, it
was focused on the impact that long descriptions might have on users in results.
I was more interested in the user behavior of interacting with the top results.
I also had one of my key audiences in mind, that of search marketers. So I made
sure to cover the story in a way to bring the findings home to them. So the
takeaway? Read those studies and dig out the interesting nuggets for your
particular audience.

Wikiseek: Leveraging
Wikipedia For Web Search, Poorly was the fifth most popular story, with
Google keyword searches sending the most traffic, about 60. This came off of
terms like wikipedia and wikiseek via Google News, as best I can tell. Takeaways
here? Think about your page titles, of course. I made sure to have the names of
both key players in the page title, to help do better for those words.

Second, not being first can suck! I knew Wikiseek was coming. Many bloggers
did. They’d been in contact with several. But the company clearly gave
Techcrunch the nod, knowing that handing over to them first would generate a lot
of attention. Andy Beal over at Marketing Pilgrim

suggested Techcrunch somehow didn’t wait. Not at all. Techcrunch clearly

went out with a story "early" with Wikiseek’s cooperation. That fueled
getting Techcrunch

a ton of Digg love.

Hey, I get to go out with stuff before others at times, and I love when that
happens. But if you can’t get the scoop, what can you do. I debated dropping a
comment at Digg to my own article. But I didn’t have time to engage in the
conversation there. I had a ton of other things to write yesterday. So I avoided
doing the link drop. In other cases, this might have been a great way to tap
into the traffic blow. Neil Patel has great tips on this in his

There Is More to Digg than the Homepage post.

If you can’t get the scoop, what can you do? Do something different. For me,
it was easy. I decided to actually use the darn search engine and see how it
worked, rather than just write about how it was supposed to work. As it turned
out, I found it disappointing. But it would still have been a good different
angle if it was great, simply because I didn’t see a lot of people doing
comparative reviews.

So that was yesterday, with just under 9,000 page views and 5,100 overall
visitors. Overall top sources were:

• Direct Navigation: 1,458 visits
• Google Organic/Keyword Driven: 728 visits
• Techmeme: 526 visits
• Google Home Page/Reader Referrals: 418 visits
• Bloglines: 189

At sixth place as a referral source was
Download Squad. I haven’t mentioned
them yet. That’s because the were a major source of traffic but not for one of
the top five stories yesterday. Instead, they’d seen our
More Spotting Google’s
Related Searches At Bottom Of Page post and

referenced it. That sent about 100 visitors.

There’s another takeaway here. We’d reported on those darn searches back in
December. Then I started seeing everyone talk about them again. Part of me
thought "old news." But clearly there was a ramp up with these, plus people
weren’t aware that these had started over a month ago. So it was time to do a
short revisit. Old news can be new news.

Also interesting is how last week’s powerhouse article 25 Tips To Optimize
Your Blog For Readers & Search Engines from Jennifer Slegg kept bringing
in the referrals. It still drew 200 views yesterday, with Jen’s own site
sending
probably around 100 visitors over the past few days, and StumbleUpon

contributed as well. When I do the monthly recap, it will be interesting to
see if all the traffic from that article from various sources can rival Digg
traffic. Sort of tapping into the long tail of referrals, I suppose!