21 replies to this topic

[Randy]

Who knows Vijay. It would take a lot of detective work to find a cause most likely.

If I were a betting man, I'd say a lot has to do with the markets we're targeting and the type of products/services being offered perhaps? I know on my sites the percentage of referral traffic from this or that search engine can vary wildly from other sites that are targeting other market sectors. As Jill pointed out above.

This divergance is why I tend to take an aggregate of all sites in all sectors when I look at gross referral types of stats. Between all of the sites I average somewhere around 9 million uniques per month. Sometimes a little more, sometimes a little less. So I consider it a good place to start. It's not like I'm looking at one site in one market, but neither are you. That said, my bigger B2C sites may be skewing the numbers somewhat, I haven't looked at it that closely honestly.

Quite frankly, it's a moot point as far as I'm concerned --especially going forward since MSN is about to change things around for us yet again. I could care less where the traffic comes from as long as they buy something when they get there!

It's the blessing and curse of running your own e-commerce sites.

[Webmaster T]

I would agree with Randy but not because of raw traffic. It makes sense to have a strategy that isn't Google centric because at anytime users could go elsewhere, Google could change the algo (Remember Florida?), and optimizing for other engines does isolate you, to some degree, from this sort of algo chasing.

IMO, if you are using "best practices" optimization techniques this isn't going to hurt your Google strategy. IMO, the biggest difference between all engines ranking algos is how they use backlinks. Therefore if Google turns the screws on non relevant links you aren't affected as much.

[amabaie]

IMO, if you are using "best practices" optimization techniques this isn't going to hurt your Google strategy. IMO, the biggest difference between all engines ranking algos is how they use backlinks. Therefore if Google turns the screws on non relevant links you aren't affected as much.

You make a good point. Best practices for a broad SE market will help with all SEs, including Google. The only real difference, in practical terms, is whether to exchange links with a site base don PR, as opposed to relevancy, Alexa rating, placement on the site, etc.

Turn off the Google toolbar, and you can optimize equally well for all ... until MSN delivers a curve ball none of us suspect.

[ephricon]

Regarding the percentage of visitors from each engine, it also really depends who your target audience is. Different types of people use different search engines.

If you have techie-based products or services, you'll most likely find that your users search with Google.

However, if you're selling to consumers, many of them do use MSN or Yahoo.

J

I dunno I think Google is def. the most mainstream - not just techies but the general public alot too.

I've even noticed Google becoming a part of pop culture lately - there's several dif. radio shows I listen to during the day (news, sports, etc) that use "google" as a verb meaning "to search". Shows its popularity...

[Jill]

Definitely it is, ephricon, but there are still (surprisingly) a ton of people who never heard of Google, or simply don't know how to find it and use it!

Their default page is MSN or whatever, so they do their searching there. (Or they search for Google there! )

Google is definitely pervading our culture, and gets more and more users every day. This is why even if they start completely sucking tomorrow, it will take many years for them to lose their momentum and market share.

Jill

[Randy]

Good points by one and all ! I couldn't agree more with the idea of following good, basic practices. It really does help to insulate you from algo tweaks.

A general question as to where traffic comes from...

Is anybody else noticing more and more traffic being delivered by ISP-type searches? Not a huge percentage from any single ISP, but when I combine all of these ISP's together they're amounting to 5-15% depending upon the site.

Yes, I know those search results are all provided by one of the larger search engines. However over the last year or so I've been noticing a trend of more and more traffic being delivered straight from ISP portal pages.

Same theory as is hinted at above I figure. People install their broadband software and their home page is made to be the ISP's portal page. Which has a search box on it, of course.

[BrianR]

It's not a bold statement from viewing the stats of my own 100+ sites

Admittedly, I'm tracking only a fraction of the number of sites that you are, Randy, but mine are all B2B sites. And I still see Google, quite consistently, with 50+% of the traffic. I guess the different markets - B2B in the UK - must make the difference. But I'm thinking that might just change when Microsoft gets involved...

BrianR