Search Engine Land: Top Stories & Stats, Jan. 9, 2007

Earlier I did a
review of traffic stats for Search Engine Land in December 2006. Today, I’m
looking at what happened on the site yesterday, in terms of most popular
stories. I can’t promise to do this every day. But doing a daily stats review is
part of my regular routine, and it helps me keep track of what drove traffic
when I do a monthly review as well. So here’s yesterday on Search Engine Land,
looking at our top stories and what made them pop.

Google Named
Fortune’s Best Place To Work, But Rich Early Employees Checking Out had
about 900 unique page views, our top page. Most of those came off of people
searching for

google on Google News, about 450 visits from that. Those browsing and
finding us on Google News sent another 75 or so visitors. It
got on
Digg from someone spotting it, but it never got any legs there, sending only 25
people. For us, this story was really Google gold.

Blogs take a lot of flak especially in Digg comments for simply seen as
regurgitating the news. I think this is a good example of how you can go beyond
regurgitation and add some value. It wasn’t one story I was summarizing. I
actually combined three related looks at Google employees into one. Google got
named the best place to work from Fortune, but the San Francisco Chronicle found
some rich ex-Googlers talking about a culture change at the company. For
dessert, I tossed in a reference to an AP article on how Google insider sales
are fueling California’s tax coffers.

Open Letter To
Wikipedia Editors: Yes, Matt Cutts Is Notable was second most popular, with
about 700 unique views. Here, the audience was completely different. Most of
those coming from Google News are probably interested in Google but not search
marketers, I’d say. That’s fine — I want that audience. But the Wikipedia
article was especially meant to help rally search marketers to turn out and
support Matt. Threadwatch is an especially heavy search marketer oriented site,
and that was our top referring source, about 110 visitors
from there. Another 100 came
over from Techmeme.
HighRankings Forums
sent
another 25, as did
Mikkel deMib Svensen’s blog.

25 Tips To Optimize
Your Blog For Readers & Search Engines from Jennifer Slegg came in late in
the day but still quickly shot up to be our third most popular story, with about
500 unique views. It was yet again a third type of story — not a news summary,
not a rallying rant but instead an informative tips based article. Stumbleupon

sent the most, about 100 people. I confess — I’ve yet to get my head around
how exactly Stumbleupon works, in terms of how readers submit to it and tracking
what happens there. I’ve got it on my to do list to return to. The story also

hit Digg but hasn’t risen enough (only 16 Diggs right now) to drive any
significant traffic. FYI, an entire range of new sources are sending traffic to
the article today — I’ll return to it if I do a review tomorrow.

Yahoo Acquires
MyBlogLog & More On How It Works was our fourth most popular story, about
350 visitors. This was a mixture of news of the acquisition at the top but
mainly a how-to about the service. Everyone was already writing about the story
as I could see on
Techmeme when I started my day. I knew we had to mention it, but I wanted to
do something different. Figuring many of our readers might be unfamiliar with
the service, I went the "intro to how you can use" it route. That slight
difference was probably enough to help
break me out of the
pack of stories at Techmeme, which sent us the most visitors to the story, 60 of
them. Google Blogscoped
sent us
another 20 or so.

Google Moon, Google
Mars, Now Google Universe? Google Partnership With Space Telescope Project May
Make UniTube Possible was the fifth most popular, with about 220 visitors.
Most of those came off of people searching for

google on Google News, just over 100. That rises to about 125 if you count
in those who found us through browsing. Fark
sent us another 15, or
at least the TotalFark subscription area did. This was another potential
case of news regurgitation. But unlike the AP story that triggered our post, we
linked to the actual telescope project site, noted the involvement of a former
Google engineering VP, pointed at a past interview of him plus gave some
background on other Google-related space projects.

Overall, top sources were:

• Direct Navigation: 1,185 visits
• Google Organic/Keyword Driven: 949 visits
• Google Home Page/Reader Referrals: 430 visits
• Bloglines: 180 visits
• Techmeme: 171 visits

It was also our busiest non-Digg related traffic day since we launched, about
8,000 page views and 5,000 visitors. Now I’m off to write some stories!