I published traffic stats for my blog for 2006 and 2007, so it’s time for the 2008 statistics.
The rough summary is:
2006: 1.7M visits and 2.9M pageviews
2007: 2.3M visits and 4.8M pageviews, plus 31K RSS readers
2008: 3.4M visits and 5.7M pageviews, plus 46K RSS readers, 7986 followers on my Twitter stream, and 1607 subscribers on FriendFeed.
My most popular posts had nothing to do with search engine optimization (SEO). The top traffic-driving posts of 2008 were:
- My Gmail power tips post.
- My “Best Business Card Ever” post.
- The series of blog posts about Chrome that I did in September 2008.
- My two posts about my Halloween costume and Google’s anti-zombie robots.txt on Halloween.
In addition, my how to hack an iphone article was posted in Sept. 2007 but continued to drive especially strong traffic. If visitors were all I wanted, I’d write about nothing but the iPhone. 
Almost as interesting were my traffic sources:
Google and direct visits were a large fraction of my traffic, but so were sites such as Digg, StumbleUpon, Google Image Search, Techmeme, delicious, and Twitter. It’s a good reminder that social media sites and places like image search can drive quite a bit of traffic.
All of this data is courtesy of FeedBurner and Google Analytics, which make this sort of analysis quite easy. What do your 2008 traffic stats look like?
I hadn’t looked at my browser marketshare in a while, so I fired up Google Analytics:
Rough browser numbers are
| Firefox |
57.58% |
| IE |
26.07% |
| Safari |
6.48% |
| Chrome |
5.11% |
| Opera |
2.35% |
| Mozilla |
1.44% |
| SeaMonkey |
0.48% |
| Mozilla Compatible |
0.18% |
| Konqueror |
0.13% |
| Camino |
0.04% |
OneStat says that they see 0.54% share for Google Chrome. Net Applications provides an hour-by-hour graph, which is nice, but they hardwired it to look for the string “Chrome 0.2″ when Chrome is on version 0.3 or 0.4 by now. Just eyeballing the Chrome 0.3 version stats, it looked like about 0.85% market share according to Net Applications. Hey Net Applications folks, any chance you’d be willing to roll up all the Chrome versions into your hourly report?
I hadn’t realized that Internet Explorer usage had dropped so low for my site (~26%). What does your browser marketshare stats look like for the last month or so for your site(s)?
P.S. Stephen Shankland writes about switching to Google Chrome because of the speed, while ExtremeTech also concluded that Chrome is speedy. And if you haven’t seen it, there’s a new version of Chrome (0.4.154.25) that adds a couple nice features:
Bookmark manager with import/export.
Use the ‘Customize and control Google Chrome’ (wrench) menu to open the Bookmark manager. You can search bookmarks, create folders, and drag and drop bookmarks to new locations. The Bookmark Manager’s Tools menu lets you export or import bookmarks.
Privacy section in Options.
We grouped together all of the configuration options for features that might send data to another service. Open the wrench menu, click Options, and select the Under the Hood tab.
Personally, I run the dev channel version of Chrome because I like to see what cool features are coming soon. I think the dev channel has averaged weekly updates, which is really nice because you can literally watch plug-in fixes and other improvements arrive every few days. It’s wild to see client software updated that often instead of every few months.
Update, 11/28/2008: Somehow I missed the getclicky.com browser marketshare stats from 60K+ sites. They peg Chrome at 1.55%, with a little bit of 1.6% to 1.7% in the last week or so.
Sorry that the blog was down for a few hours. Yesterday I did a throwaway post that somehow ended up getting 3800+ diggs or so. I didn’t have WP-Cache or Supercache turned on, so my blog melted to a little puddle of fail.
“Matt, you idiot! How you could run a modern WordPress blog without caching turned on?” you may ask. The first answer is that I’m stupid and figured that I was boring enough that I wouldn’t hit digg or Slashdot for anything.
The slightly-less-stupid answer is that turning on WordPress caching interacts really badly with the FreeBSD systems that my webhost Pair runs (I’ve written about this before). That means that for me, upgrading WordPress takes hours and is a pain in the butt. The last time I upgraded my WP install, I didn’t install Supercache simply because it was such a headache to uninstall before.
I have to do some thinking about what I might change (blogging platform, webhost, etc.) in the future to make this less painful. Frankly, the idea of racing to update my software every few months (so that I don’t need to worry about getting hacked) strikes me as a little backwards; I’d prefer to host my blog with some web service so that I never have to worry about security releases or downloading/upgrading software myself. I don’t blame WordPress or Pair, but the combination doesn’t work well for me right now.
One suggestion for WordPress: integrate caching functionality more tightly so that managing caching isn’t a multi-step process and doesn’t involve juggling plug-ins. Another WordPress suggestion: lower the price of VIP hosting ($600 setup fee + $500/month is too high; if you lowered that a lot, you could probably attract a bunch of people who don’t want to fiddle with WordPress upgrades) and make it trivial to do a CNAME like blog.mattcutts.com to VIP hosting. One suggestion for WP-Cache and Supercache: make an option that clears out all cache files and deletes all directories created by the caching plugin, then atomically disables caching. Maybe that option is there and I’ve missed it somehow. One suggestion for Pair: if I am the owner of a parent directory, let me delete any file or subdirectory from that directory. Then I could delete silly cache files that are owned by “nobody.” Again, I know the fault is primarily mine for not turning on caching, even if it’s a hassle.
Since you’ve been so nice to read my self-absorbed tale of woe, here’s a picture of my cat Ozzie, helping me hack on the blog:
This is my personal blog. I don’t run my draft posts by Google’s PR or legal team, other than maybe 2-3 times when I thought a post might have legal implications. But I have learned a few hard-won lessons. So, when someone recently asked me for tips about talking to the public, I couldn’t resist. Whether you blog for the company officially or unofficially, here are my top three rules of thumb:
- Don’t make hard promises about the future. One of the beauties of web-based software and services is you get to decide when to push out changes. Don’t give up that freedom by promising a feature to the outside world by a certain deadline. Maybe later you’ll decide that a different feature is a bigger win. Or you may want to hold off for a week to polish down the last rough edges on a product.
- Don’t trash talk a competitor. Your product should be strong enough that you don’t have to diss a competing company. Back in 2002, an article in the Boston Herald showed up about another search engine. The article claimed that “The entire XXXXXXXXX Catalog is updated every 9 to 11 days.” I knew for a fact that wasn’t true and at first I wanted to rip that claim to shreds like a bulldog. But (with the advice of some wiser Googlers), I decided to take the high road instead of picking a fight. In fact, claims like that motivated Google to be fresher and faster. Now I believe Google has the freshest index of any of the major web search engines.
Sometimes other companies will throw dirt in your direction. In that case, the challenge is to correct any misperceptions without picking a fight. But first ask yourself: do you really need to respond at all? If not, then maybe it’s better not to get pulled into an argument where everyone involved loses a little credibility. So far I’ve written 10-15 draft posts (and who knows how many I’ve written in my head) where I was snarky about another search engine, and then not published the post. Each time when I look back after a few months, I’m glad that I didn’t post.
- Don’t post when you’re angry. This is probably the most important tip. If you have to write something, go ahead, but don’t press publish until you’ve slept on the situation or had a chance to calm down completely.
I’ve broken each of these rules, and regretted it almost every time. What tips would you suggest when blogging about your company?
On my “Matt Cutts” twitter account a few days ago I asked other folks which WordPress “Related Posts” plug-in they would recommend. It seems like “Related Posts” extensions go in and out of vogue every few years, so I wanted to hear what smart folks were using lately. The plugins that got recommended the most to me were:
I did a little digging on each of these. My criteria (in order) was: the easiest plugin to install, that appeared to be actively maintained, and ideally would give me lots of options. The first one I ended up trying was Yet Another Related Posts Plugin (YARPP), and mitcho has really done a fantastic job on it:
- It’s trivial to install.
- You don’t have to edit your WordPress template.
- The relevance is good: the suggested posts are related, and you can tweak thresholds and how things are computed if you want.
So I think I’m happy. Even the things that I might want down the road (show the date of posts, RSS feed support, and sentence-aware excerpts) are on the to-do list. But the plug-in is very usable even without any tweaking. I’ll include a screenshot of the options page in case you want to see what sort of flexibility you have:
Well done, mitcho! If you feel strongly that another Related Posts plugin is better, feel free to say so in the comments.
