* * * * *
                                        
                                 Googletracking
                                        
I'm sorry, I just find this stuff interesting.

Marcus [1] wrote in, asking why Google [2] seems to have abandoned his
weblog, although I'm not sure if he was asking about referers from Google, or
Google actually spidering [3] 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.

Table: Google spidering vs. Google referers for The Boston Diaries
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): 



Table: Google spidering vs. Google referers for Conman Laboratories
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/ [4]
used to be hosted elsewhere, but when I first moved it to conman.org [5] 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. 

[1] http://viasteallarum.antville.org/
[2] http://www.google.com/
[3] http://www.googlebot.com/bot.html
[4] http://www.conman.org/people/spc/
[5] http://www.conman.org/

Email author at sean@conman.org

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