My search stats for 2006

[Note: I wrote this about five days ago, and I’m just now getting around to posting it.]

Okay, all the other search bloggers are sharing stats, so here goes. πŸ™‚ All this comes courtesy of Google Analytics. If you want to sign up and analyze your website visitors with around zero work, I highly recommend it. And it’s free. πŸ™‚

With a few days left in 2006, looks like about 1.7M visits and about 2.9M pageviews:

stats for 2006

That number of visits (~1.7M) helps explain why I try to avoid site-specific comments and try to stick to general topics. The spikes in my traffic graph were (I think) talking about international webspam and two or three posts that got dugg. The diggage happened during the week that my wife was out of town and I had a lot of free time to blog. I have a fair number of repeat visitors from all over the world. About 1/4th of people come directly to my site and about 1/3rd reach it through Google. Those digg spikes look impressive, but digg only accounted for about 2% of my traffic throughout the year.

Top Requested Pages:

Let’s see which posts were the most popular this year.

Top posts

Looking down the list, lots of people check my blog page or the root page of my domain. Over 18% of my traffic is from non-English browsers (!), so it’s not a surprise that international spam is a popular topic. If you want only Google-related posts and no cat posts, https://www.mattcutts.com/blog/type/googleseo is the best url to use. Looking at that url up above, it seems a fair amount of people use that ability to view only the Google/SEO category. For feedreaders, https://www.mattcutts.com/blog/type/googleseo/feed/ is the best url to get a Google/SEO-only RSS feed of my blog.

Top keywords:

The vast majority of people find me through some variation of my name. Other than that, the top phrases were
seo
bigdaddy
seo blog
google update
reinclusion request
noodp
google analytics
blog
google blog
proxy

I could probably do some more in-depth keyword analysis to determine what keywords to use to reach new webmasters/SEOs/site owners. I do have a long tail of referrals. My post about setting a default printer for Linux and Firefox, for example, got referrals such as
firefox default printer
default printer firefox
changing the default printer for firefox on linux
linux default printer
changing the default printer firefox
default printer linux
cups set default printer
linux set default printer
mozilla default printer
cups default printer
firefox “default printer”

That serves as a good reminder that people usually don’t type the same phrase to find information. If you’re an SEO or site owner, don’t just chase after a “trophy phrase”; think about the long tail of queries, too. You should think of the words that people will type and make sure you include the right ones in your article in a natural way. Including the right/relevant words on the page in the first place is something that a lot of people forget. Read my post about writing useful articles with good SEO practices if you want to hear more.

Traffic Sources:

I write a techie-heavy blog that talks about Google issues, so I wouldn’t expect to see much (any?) traffic from other search engines. But the sheer number of different sites that sent traffic is pretty wild. I got more referral traffic from Bloglines (22636 visits) than from Yahoo (17591), which makes sense given that a ton of people skip the site and read my full-text feed. But other sources were surprising drivers of traffic. The Search Engine Watch blog drove more traffic (15916 visits) than MSN (13554). Ask sent 820 visits, which was a tie with Steve Bryant over at eWeek’s Google Watch site. And that in turn was a little more than Oilman (789 visits) and a little less than cre8asiteforums.com at 1253 visits.

What this says to me is that there’s a lot of traffic beyond search engines, and I’m not just talking about social media optimization such as submitting stories to Slashdot/TailRank/Reddit/Digg/SearchMob. Just getting out there, talking on the web, and getting your name known in an industry can make a big difference.

The Future:

Over the last 18 months or so, being a webmaster myself and writing a blog has taught me a lot. I understand more of the issues that site owners run into, and I sympathize with the frustrations of running a site. I think that using AdWords would also be an eye-opening and useful experience. I’m torn though, because I only have a limited amount of time in my day. If anything, I need to be spending less time blogging and more time with my family. I’ve also avoided AdSense, other types of advertising, and even “subscribe to my feed, tag this post, digg this page, share me on facebook” stuff because I wanted my site to be purely informational. But the net effect is that the blog is pretty austere (spartan? plain? ugly?).

Vanessa Fox and Adam Lasnik have done an amazing job this year on both the Google webmaster blog and the Google Discussion Group for webmasters. This year I posted on a wide range of SEO topics, and advanced topics are more fun to talk about, but going forward I think it would be a good idea to cover more intro-level material.

I think within Google there’s solid awareness that blogging can be hugely helpful to discuss issues informally, answer questions, and dispel misconceptions. I’d like to encourage even more Googlers to blog. The issue is how to build trust that a Googler can talk about issues with finesse. I’m lucky because as an old-timer Googler, I made my public mistakes back when hardly anyone was watching (remind me to tell my Paul Boutin/Wired story sometime). I think we need more Googlers blogging and checking the blogosphere for mentions of their respective products. I’m not 100% sure how to get there, but I think it needs to happen.

I also wish I had more stats on my feeds. I should probably sign up for something like FeedBurner, but I hate the idea of losing control of my feed urls.

[Added before posting: I signed up for FeedBurner last night; we’ll see how it works. I’m already curious about one thing. I’m using the officially-recommended Feedburner Feed Replacement plug-in for WordPress, which is supposed to send all feed requests over to FeedBurner. It seems to work fine for my main RSS and Atom feeds, but I notice that category feeds like the https://www.mattcutts.com/blog/type/googleseo/feed/ url I mentioned above don’t seem to be getting redirected to FeedBurner. Anyone know how to fix this? Also, let me know if you see any other feed-related issues/bugs.]

Update: In the comments, Sergey S. Kostyliov asked for geo-location stats. Here ya go, Sergey. When I said 18% of my traffic was non-English, I believe that was referring to the browser language. Where people are coming from shows even more diversity:

Geolocations for 2006

To make the graph more readable, I left out the percentage labels for the Netherlands (2.24%) and Spain (1.91%). Sergey, the Russian Federation is listed at 9955 visits. With 1,695,129 total visits for the year, that’s about .6% from the Russian Federation. Also, I got exactly one visit from Samoa. They must have decided they didn’t like me, and decided not to come back. πŸ™‚

Update 2: Doh! I completely forgot the videos I made in 2006! I got 189,923 views of my videos during 2006. Even my 3 second video of my cat Ozzie jumping that I uploaded as a test video got 2,106 views. πŸ™‚

Also, I got some initial data from FeedBurner: 11,950 subscribers and 5,149 reach (that’s people who clicked or viewed the content of my feed). Bloglines’ web interface has pegged me at 1,216 subscribers but Feedburner claims that I have 3,409 Bloglines readers. I’m not sure how to reconcile that. I was getting discouraged that Bloglines kept saying 1,100 to 1,200 subscribers for most of 2006 in its web interface, and I really felt like I had more than that. Anyone have guesses about what’s causing the Bloglines/Feedburner disparity? Gary Price, want to ask around?

68 Responses to My search stats for 2006 (Leave a comment)

  1. Matt

    Still looking forward for the first 2007 Grabbag. Don’t let us wait πŸ™‚

    Btw, I thought my favorit post Filing a reinclusion request would be number one on the list πŸ˜‰

  2. Matt, could you please also publish:
    Marketing Optimization->Visitor Segment Performance->Geo Location

    data? It would be interesting to see more detailed report from where all you readers are…

  3. Can you tell us your Paul Boutin/Wired story?

    > I should probably sign up for something like
    > FeedBurner, but I hate the idea of losing
    > control of my feed urls.

    I never understood how easily people are giving up this part. BoingBoing entrusts Feedburner the serving of tens of thousands of their readers (or whatever their number). If Feedburner is down, changes their terms, adds ads of their own, asks for lots of money etc. there’s not a whole lot you can do except telll your readers to manually change their subscriptions.

  4. Matt – re: the feedburner category issue you are having, this plugin might be what you are looking for

    Description: Allows users to redirect each category feed to his own FeedBurner feed. Unlike other plugins that redirect all the feeds to the main feed, this plugin allow you to have a feedburner feed for each category or subcategory.

  5. Happy New Year to Everyone πŸ˜‰

    Matt, did your recognize that many visitors come from europe ? Would you be interested in a german translation of your blog ? A friend of mine is a professional translator. We could do a 1:1 translation so the german speaking people can get the newest informations about google, too. If I could get your permission, please send me an email. (I do not have yours πŸ˜‰ )

  6. Congrats for those great stats Matt !!!

    It’s rare to see so much traffic from a non-adult site πŸ˜‰

  7. β˜… Thank you so-o much for sharing these β˜… – it is awesome that the Top Web 2.0 and SEO bloggers are doing this – ALL AT ONCE πŸ˜€
    LOL (For Years, only SearchEnginesWeb was doing this.

    Collectively, these stats help immensely in analyzing Search Engine Algos
    and more importantly, they allow Webmasters to access the REAL accuracy of Alexa and Compete (which was all anyone had to go on)

    The top entrances reflect those topics that were universally vital and informative to SEOs and Webmasters, that they bookmarked, linked to and reviewed again and again.

    This also illustrates the new importance of Social Bookmarking and News sites in generating traffic:
    http://digg.com/search?s=mattcutts.com&submit=Search&section=news&type=url&area=all&age=all&sort=most&search-buried=1

    More detailed information would be appreciated, for example how much traffic does the term SEO bring from Google and Yahoo – daily and monthly.

    This is the blog’s most popular term and the one that it now ranks on page one on Google and Yahoo.

    Please consider putting the FREE or Paid version of Sitemeter of Statcounter on this blog – and making it public. πŸ™‚

    So many top bloggers are now doing this. Also, MyBlogLog is a great community to consider adding πŸ™‚
    seoptimization.blog.com/1221628/

    What is unfortunate is the lack of visitors from the South American continent – perhaps, and alternate SPANISH version of the blog could be released and promoted on a Seperate directory eg: mattcutts.com/espanol.

    This would also be extremely helpful for them, and will double the traffic of the blog. (surely, there are many readers who would be honored to do the translation )

  8. Sergey, I added geo-location data to the post; thanks for mentioning it.

    Philipp Lenssen, I will tell the story at some point. Basically, I put my foot right into my mouth, and Paul Boutin very nicely helped me pull it back out. πŸ™‚

    Also, I think the feedburner stuff is a temporary redirect (looks like a 307?), so I should be able to reclaim it if I want. At least, I think it is; it seems to do weird stuff for different user agents like wget. Grrr. But I wanted to activate something by Jan. 1. And if it doesn’t work well, I can always complain about that. πŸ™‚

    Chris Winfield, thanks very much for the pointer. I hadn’t even begun looking, and that should help.

    Tobias, I did know that I had a lot of European visitors. I have to do some hard thinking about translations; normally I’ve shied away from translations to other languages, in case something is wrong in the translation. I have to think about that; maybe I should be doing more posts on the official webmaster blog and then asking someone at Google to help me with translations?

    S.E.W., I haven’t checked, but the vast majority of my traffic is for my name. I only got 6,319 visitors for the term [seo].

  9. Matt: I’m pretty sure that the FeedBurner redirect plugin only works for the main feeds. I think You’d have to manually burn feeds for all the separate categories and then modify the plugin to handle the redirect.

    Now that you’re using FeedBurner, you can help yourself and the rest of us get better statistics by getting the Google Reader folks to report the number of subscribers in the user agent the way that bloglines does, so that FeedBurner can give us an accurate count.

  10. (Scanned too quickly — now I see Chris’s pointer. Something to check out…)

  11. Interesting stuff. I notice a distinct lack of other search engine referals, or are my eyes just tired? πŸ˜€

  12. Thanks a lot, Matt!

  13. Yay. That’s quite a bunch of Europeans. But again most of your visitors seem tech-savy enough to understand your English texts (I do, I’m German).

    Aren’t there plans for Google webmaster stuff in Europe? Maybe some official texts of yours on Webmaster Central could get the translation. Sounds like a good idea to me.

  14. Scott Carpenter, I mentioned that to the Reader folks before I even tried Feedburner. πŸ™‚ I know that they’ve got a lot to work on, so I don’t know when/if they’ll be able to do that though.

    rob, my theory is that SEOs and techies skew heavily toward using Google. I did mention the referral numbers from other engines, but haven’t computed the percentage.

    Mika, I agree that would be a good idea.

  15. ah, thats what I get for looking at pretty pictures and reading with tired eyes!

  16. I understand your concerns about translations.

    But if we make clear that it is only a translation and not allways reflecting your opinion word by word (but we try to !), I think it would be a great deal for german speaking webmasters. And there are many who do not speak the English language.

  17. It’s interesting how the big spikes occur when Webmasters are feeling the most pain. After spending the past few days reviewing complaints from Webmasters in many forums, I am convinced more than ever that something more than a “data refresh” is up — even if whatever significant changes Google made were implemented months ago and it took only this long for the effects to be felt.

  18. Hi

    I am from Germany, too. I don’t think thats a good idea to translate it. Most People who are interested in SEO and Google and stuff speak english.

    Eine Menge Arbeit und Aufwand, die sich wahrscheinlich nicht lohnt. Sorry Tobias, is nur meine Meinung.

    Meier πŸ˜‰

  19. I never knew about Google Analytics. I will be having a play with it today.

  20. Nice post matt, thanks for sharing the stats

    Good luck in the new year!

  21. Hi Matt,

    Do you know whether Google Analytics tracks the page views for your site (as an example) even if I am reading the material through an RSS reader?

    Most of the time I read your entire blog in my RSS reader as you are providing all the post content in the RSS feeds.

    I am a regular reader, so I am just wondering whether this is accounted for by Google Analytics?

    Cheers and Happy New Year 2007. Great blog by the way.

    Thanks,

    Jason

  22. Michael Martinez

    “After spending the past few days reviewing complaints from Webmasters in many forums, I am convinced more than ever that something more than a β€œdata refresh” is up ..”

    I second to that, Michael. Problem is that Matt has been very quite. In fact more quite than usual about saying anything related to those “data refreshes” πŸ˜‰

  23. Matt I noticed a time ago that searching for information on “reinclusion request” brings your page about the subject from sept 8, 2005. It has good information for people, but I think the link you have in the post needs updating. I believe that the reinclusions are not handled through the webmaster tools or something, perhaps an update to that post would be prudent since you are the first search result.

    Also I think the choice to avoid adwords is a good one, it does add a sense of credibility in my eyes, and makes (some?) people more likely to link to the info presented here. It also avoids things seeming like conflcts of interest. I thought it was quite funny to hear all the audio ads for “text link ads.com” when listening to your interview on webmaster radio a time ago. It seemed like an endorsement for an ad company in some ways.

    Your blog is only plain and spartan since you pulled the spam button / spam sword pic during the digg spike. Perhaps a “most popular posts” on the sidebar, or links to the various niche rss feeds would spruce it up a bit and add more to the blog rather than detract from it..

    2 cents imho for ya, thank you blogging this year, you are a yoda among webmasters (imho). I for one appreciate your candor, and integrity (for posting critiques of google hiccups and defending yahoo’s page views, etc.)

    Happy new year!

  24. Let me think it over, Tobias. Harith/Michael Martinez, I talked about it a little more at http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/explaining-algorithm-updates-and-data-refreshes/#comment-92807

    Jason, I don’t think it does. Fundamentally, web-based feedreaders seem to cache the RSS and then show it to all their subscribers. So I think even if you generated a unique image for each RSS fetch, the Reader (or Bloglines) fetcher would grab that unique image and cache it; there may not be any way to track subscribers in RSS accurately right now. I basically pulled this whole paragraph out of thin air though. I don’t know if this is actually how it works; anyone else know more?

    Steve, yup, reinclusion requests should be done through the webmaster console now. That’s one of the first intro-level pieces of info that I need to refresh.

  25. Perhaps those refreshes of your intro- level pieces could be turned into official guidance on one of the blogs?

  26. wow impressive!, nice traffic Matt!! I think the owner of mattcutt.com has a huge traffic too.

  27. Google Reader not giving stats is an exception. GR not providing it has been a fairly major concern for a lot of publishers, but I always thought it might be a design decision, giving additional privacy, in much the same way that Gmail doesn’t display images thus doesn’t give open rates by default.

    Analytics will be great when they offer comprehensive Adsense tracking, enough to defend yourself if there is a click-fraud problem, and maybe combining with some split testing.

  28. Hi Matt

    I’m surprised that South Africa did not feature in your country stats. I thought we were a far more “Google” aware crowd. Do you have a number for SA or did it not feature at all?
    Thanks and love your blog! πŸ™‚

  29. Nice traffic!, why you don’t put adsense in your blog? =P
    Happy new year!

  30. Matt thanks, this is really interesting.

    I’m trying to figure out why Jeremy Z gets a much higher percentage of his traffic from Google than you do. I’m guessing it’s related to his much higher number of total posts but not sure why that would have this effect on traffic.

  31. Matt

    “Harith/Michael Martinez, I talked about it a little more at…”

    I might need your help to understand the term “changes” you mentioned several times in relation to data refreshes. Even Adam Lasnik has started to use it too πŸ™

    People have noticed several type of changes:

    – changes in ranking

    – changes in indexing

    – pages turned supplementals

    – changes in number of backlinks

    – changes of the quality of Google’s serps. Good or bad.

    So… are you telling us that from now on we are going to see all above mentioned “changes” on daily basis?

    How are we going to do SEO for Google in future under such “hostile environment” πŸ™‚

  32. Matt,

    As I see on the Geo Map, you have not even a single visit from Africa for the whole year?? Not even by accident? I guess there is no need for seo, no spam or what?

    Anyway, congrats for the very interesting post and a Happy New Year!

  33. What the figures really indicate to me is how seriously the UK – and Europe as a general market – needs to be taken by search engines as an audience.

    I mean, when was the last time a “name” from Google appeared at SES London, let alone put on a party? Google sends PPC account managers – great! – but compare that to the attendance at US SES shows.

    Can we please have some recognised names in the UK soon? Yourself and Vanessa Fox I’m sure would make for a great team over here. And a good excuse for a sight-seeing holiday, too. πŸ™‚

  34. I am one of the regular readers of your blog and each post in your blog has been an interesting/informative read πŸ™‚

    But I do have one question (off topic though ) on the Title of the blog !

    “Matt Cutts: Gadgets, Google, and SEO”

    Where does this “Gadgets” fit into the blog, I don’t remember to have read much on Gadgets on your blog πŸ™‚

  35. Andy: I can’t see that there should be a privacy issue if in the Google FeedFetcher user agent it reports the number of subscribers — that tells you nothing about how those subscribers are.

  36. “Harith/Michael Martinez, I talked about it a little more at http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/explaining-algorithm-updates-and-data-refreshes/#comment-92807

    Matt, I wasn’t questioning your statement that there would now be continuous data refreshes.

    I’m simply pointing out that there are other changes Google has implemented in the past few months — perhaps in the August – October period you outlined for us this Summer — that have clearly, obviously, and oh-so-blatantly caused many thousands of link-poor Web sites to go Supplemental and in some cases to vanish completely.

    You don’t have to admit to, dispute, or in any way address, confirm, or deny anything. The changes in behavior at Google are clearly, widely, and completely well documented in numerous online forums and blogs.

    We’re way past the “It’s just a data refresh” stage. Whatever it is, I am not personally holding you responsible for its effect.

    I was just pointing out how interesting it is that your traffic spikes every time Google makes a huge, horrendous change — even if you personally don’t see that anything huge happened, or if you personally are not at liberty to discuss anything other than “data refresh” activity.

    I have no doubt that more frequent, continuous data refreshes should result in more frequent, continuous search results changes. But that is not what people are reporting.

    So, not to put too fine a point on it, there is a huge disconnect between what you are confirming and what people are complaining about.

    Which really has nothing to do with the fact that I feel you have become the visual figurehead for Google by virtual of your direct accessibility. This blog made you far more accessible than anyone else at Google. Because of that accessibility, you are — for all intents and purposes — perceived as the “voice of Google” — despite your disclaimer.

  37. Bogdan: For the Geo map, in that view GA just shows you 100 data points. The most you can see is 500 at a time.

  38. Excellent results Matt. Best of luck in the new year.

  39. Hi Matt,

    some months ago I had a look at one of “my” server statistics and found out that around 10 percent of the people coming from search engines (most of them from Google) are lost people if do not find a way to make your feeds work for you.

    I also heard about the feedburner solution but I didn`t like the idea of outsourcing my feeds. I checked the feedburner results for somebody else and saw lots of 302 redirects. This has defenitly not been the solution I was looking for.

    Instead I had to find a way to give my feeds more usability with an easy to handle look and feel (some HTML instead of RSS code) so that people are able to read the feeds and follow all post and comment URLs. Additionally you can add your most important links, e.g. your “googleseo category” or some text to explain how it works… I installed this “fix” on several blogs already. It`s good for visitors, good for traffic and Google seems to ignore the workaround. Shit happens… πŸ˜‰

    The bad thing is that IE7 as well as Mozilla Firefox (2.0.0.1) are also ignoring your feed work completely. They seem to have recognized the feed problem already and fixed it using their own layout as well as explanations which works fine, too, but actually the newest browser versions are missing your most important links if people make use of modern browsers. ;-(

    However. If you like to have a copy of my solution and work with your own server stats after that I could try to explain it (English and German).

    All you need is a little XSL file some CSS and a bit of code in your wp-rss2.php as well as in your wp-commentsrss2.php to swap older browsers to your XSL feed like I did. For me this is the best way to work with feeds. So IΒ΄ll explain it anyway. If you like you can grab a copy from my blog in a view days. Hopefully it`s online tomorrow already (it`s 11.45 p.m. here right now). But I`m sure you should find a similar XSL solution for WordPress with Google otherwise, if you like idea of giving your feed some usability instead of outsourcing it.

  40. feedthebot, we are looking for ways that I can just brain dump and someone can assist in writing that up in some more official way. If it starts to happen, it would be on the webmaster help pages or on the webmaster blog.

    Andy Beard, the next time I see a Reader person I’ll try to remember to ask more.

    Caraie, I talked about that a little bit toward the bottom of the post.

    Brian Turner, you said “I mean, when was the last time a β€œname” from Google appeared at SES London.” Does this mean in the name of openness and better communication, I must needs go to London now? πŸ™‚

    Venu, if people would just show a little less interest in the Google/SEO side of things, I’m sure I’d have copious free time to talk about Gadgets. πŸ™‚

    Michael Martinez, I can try to talk more about things like supplemental more. Usually it’s not because I’m trying to sidestep, but because I’ve said the high-order bits already. For example, the main thing that determines presence in the supplemental index is PageRank. Not enough links for a page to make it into the regular web index? Then it’s likely to be an issue of not enough PageRank to that page. The page used to do well and now it’s in the supplemental results? It could be that links that previously counted aren’t as trusted anymore. For example, if someone’s doing a co-op link exchange, or buying links, or reciprocal linking to excess, that’s the sort of thing where those links might not be counting as much as they used to.

  41. Thank you, Matt. I think that will help people put things into perspective far more readily than anything I may have said over the past few weeks.

  42. Hi Matt,

    Thanks for sharing all the great information, and great job on all the attention you’ve been receiving through your blog.

  43. Thanks Matt I appreciate your response and what you are doing with this blog.

  44. These stats, and the blog in general, are very interesting.
    I’m surprised that I don’t see Israel on the map. Contrary to being a very techie country, I guess we are still weak in the SEO field.

    Happy new year!

  45. A 7th place is not very bad for a small country like The Netherlands!

  46. I have unintentionally skewed a bit your stats. Every time I visit your site I do it by typing “Matt Cutts” in Google. I did not bother to bookmark your page neither I type URL in my browser.

    I wonder how many of us cutlets are doing it and if I assume there more examples like this one how reliable is any statistical tool?

  47. Great! Looks like I am the only one in Brazil that actually reads your blog. πŸ™‚ That gives a competitive advantage πŸ™‚

  48. HI!

    very interesting stats/records Matt!

    this blog becomes so much attention frome europe, because the
    expactations are high in Europe, and it seemed that you are the way
    they think they could doe it with humor and less danger.

    I am also a fan of my own little Stats and seen some stupid things there the last weeks and want to asked around:

    in many browser I can see private Lan-Adresses or links and URL
    (like in my firefox)

    but is something (as you can see upon, I-net-mobbing) usuall
    and have I to live with it further?

    212.23.126.XXX – – [31/Dec/2006:14:41:36 +0100] “GET / HTTP/1.1” 200 – http://www.XXX.de “http://www.wir-wir-wir.de.tl/Forum/thema-1-Hier-kannst-du-mit-mir-gute-Links-zusammentragen.htm?” “Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 7.0; Windows NT 5.1; .NET CLR 1.1.4322)” “-”
    ?harmless

    172.158.30.XXX- – [31/Dec/2006:16:27:59 +0100] “GET / HTTP/1.1” 200 – http://www.XXX.de “http://88.198.45.9/designs/flash/Blubber%20menu.swf?color=0x000000&labels=Home_-_-___-_-_Findest%20du%20euer%20Haus?_-_-___-_-_Forum&positio” “Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1; SV1; .NET CLR 1.1.4322; .NET CLR 2.0.50727)” “-”

    or worster and scensored πŸ™‚ AT XXX

    87.123.64.XXX – – [18/Dec/2006:15:51:42 +0100] “GET /links.html HTTP/1.1” 200 9748 http://www.xxx.de “http://www.google.de/search?q=tiffany+%2Bspectrum+%2Buroboros&hl=de&lr=lang_de&start=20&sa=N” “Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1; XXXloch; du bist ein; .NET CLR 1.1.4322)” “-”

    or a menace and when to ?whom

    172.158.30.XXX – – [31/Dec/2006:16:27:59 +0100] “GET / HTTP/1.1” 200 – http://www.XXX.de “http://88.198.45.9/designs/flash/Blubber%20menu.swf?color=0x000000&labels=Home_-_-___-_-_Findest%20du%20euer%20Haus?_-_-___-_-_Forum&positio” “Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1; SV1; .NET CLR 1.1.4322; .NET CLR 2.0.50727)” “-”

    I dont thing about google on this – just used from ?them,
    but please write, who knows that and maybe thats a cause to give away the Stats-process to an outsider?

    Greetings Karl

  49. Interesting stats Matt! I usually find you by using just “matt cutts” but that does not reflect there in top keywords phrase.

  50. “Does this mean in the name of openness and better communication, I must needs go to London now? :)”

    Well, if you can fit a visit to SES London inbetween visits to the Houses of Parliament, Tower of London, the London Eye… πŸ˜‰

  51. Hi Matt,

    interesting to compare some other stats. For example, the CIA Worldbook offers population stats. US – 300M, UK, 60M. So if the US gets 750k visits, you’d expect about 150k visits from the UK to keep in the same proportion to population. 210k visits is around 35% higher than you’d expect. If you then add stats on penetration of ADSL (an indication of how much internet usage/access there is) then the UK stat is more surprising (US has a higher ADSL penetration than UK, according to the last IAB stats that I saw – by more than 20%). Eric Schmidt, quoted in The Economist says that the UK has a higher proportion of online advertising spend than the US (17% of all advertising in the UK, almost three times the US rate, IIRC), because of non-commercial BBC TV watching.

    The UK is highly interested in search marketing, disproportionately so. And we do get relatively little attention from Google. Some of the betas are, probably unintentionally, discriminating against UK based organisations – the Web Page Optimizer beta only accepts a US phone number, for example.

    Cheers, JeremyC.

  52. I see only 8 subscribers in bloglines (which is clearly incorrect), because I recently subscribed to your SEO/Google specific feed. So that may partly explain the discrepancy between different versions of your stats.

    I have an added question, why do you have all those ‘how to’ things listed as SEO/google?

    from another of your Dutch readers πŸ™‚

  53. Katinka,

    Leuke website, Doe je aan links uitwisselen?

    For the non dutch readers (and Matt too of course, who probably also doesn’t speak dutch, πŸ™‚ ), who might get worried reading the above, hereΒ΄s a translation:

    Nice website, do you exchange links?

  54. Matt, there are a couple reasons the FeedBurner stats don’t add up to the Bloglines subs counts, first we are seeing multiple feed formats:
    http://www.bloglines.com/search?q=www.mattcutts.com&ql=en&s=fr&pop=l&news=m&t=f&n=100

    It sounds like you were only aware of the main feed, and were only looking at the sub counts for the top feed, and not adding them all together.

    It does look like you are attempting to redirect these different feeds to FeedBurner at the HTTP level. Normally when multiple feeds redirect to the same URL, we automatically combine them.

    However, The reason they are not being combined, is that you are using an HTTP Temporary Redirect, rather than a Permanent Redirect.

    You need to change his webserver configuration to use a Permanent Redirect, and within a week or so, Bloglines will automatically show a unified subscriber count, for all of his feeds. (We are just trying to follow RFCs here, and temporary means it could go away at any time…. and that we shouldn’t save the new URL)

    The other alternative is to use the Bloglines Publisher Tools ( http://www.bloglines.com/profile?mode=4 ), where you could combine the feeds in a few minutes.

    Thanks,

    Paul Querna
    Bloglines Engineer

  55. Awesome answer–thanks for stopping by with so much info, Paul. Gary Price, thanks for acting as the intermediary to get this question answered. πŸ™‚

  56. Wouldn’t spikes be related to page rank updates?
    I can see one in july, others might be christmas, chinese new year… πŸ˜‰

  57. Congratulations Matt,
    They are fantastic stats for a great blog. Downunder in Aus (Australia for those who dont know!) there are a stack of people I know who follow your blog, not just at the Advertising agency I work for, but local forums & industry guys aswell.

    You provide some fantastic feedback, great insite, timely posts and prove Google really listens to its users. (not that anyone was debating that!)

    Hope to see you down here some day. I’ll buy you a beer!

  58. Matt Cutts wrote:
    “I’ve also avoided AdSense, other types of advertising, and even β€œsubscribe to my feed, tag this post, digg this page, share me on facebook” stuff because I wanted my site to be purely informational.”

    It would be interesting to see angry reactions if you implement (even a faked) adsense ads on your blog.

  59. Wow, congrats! I would love to have stats like those. πŸ™‚

  60. Fundamentally, web-based feedreaders seem to cache the RSS and then show it to all their subscribers. So I think even if you generated a unique image for each RSS fetch, the Reader (or Bloglines) fetcher would grab that unique image and cache it; there may not be any way to track subscribers in RSS accurately right now. I basically pulled this whole paragraph out of thin air though. I don’t know if this is actually how it works; anyone else know more?

    I’m pretty sure Google Analytics is currently incapable of giving you stats for people reading RSS feeds. GA depends on a piece of Javascript embedded in your page, making a call to the Google servers with the information it needs. Except for a tiny number of feed readers – that access the post URLs and render the actual post pages – most only run the feed through a style-sheet. Which is, of course, completely transparent to GA.

    What would be useful, is if GA allowed some way of routing RSS feeds through their servers. It’s probably not feasible because of bandwidth implications. Still, if they could figure out some way of only routing the HTTP header through the GA server, that would work.

    The one thing that surprised me about Google Analytics, though it should have been obvious, was that GA cannot track requests from user-agents that do not support JavaScript. This, I believe, would include people who use browser extensions like NoScript, visitors surfing on their mobile phones, and users within intranets with security policies that prevent JavaScript from being executed. Unfortunately, you’d have no idea about the traffic you get from this set of viewers, since GA ignores them completely.
    There is some information that GA can glean from non-JavaScript requests, and that (along with a number indicating the proportion of non-JS users – typically 1-2% but you never know), would be quite useful. 1% of a million visits is still 10,000 visits.

  61. Okay, finally noticed that Matt is listed for SES London. There’s a reason to visit, now. πŸ™‚

  62. Keep going!

  63. You should get a cat next time and name it Leontief.

  64. I use google analytics since 2 months and have to say it’s an excellent tool, easy to use and lots of info, splendid!

    regards

    Frank

  65. I use Google TOOLS since 1 One Year. Besides Sitemap is anylystics to me an eye opening tool. Mighty and in cooporation with Adwords it enabled me to develope a strategy to improve Content – and relevant visits!!!!!
    Even so I`m far away from (see the Map above) Matt`s going into million results. But I could proofe relevant results brought sales to my advertisers! I Now I will offer my service to customers wanting to pulish their service -or sell products in Germany!

  66. Some days later: Google analystics since yesterday even better. Also I will miss some function which ro me have been easier to be used! The new version is intotatally new style. I hope analystics can keep some function!

  67. I’ve noticed the blog has 10x more visitors than any other section. It is the same way with my website. It looks to be a good sign that you have a group of people who are always looking for new information from you.

  68. thnxxx

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