October Web Search Referral Statistics (by Jeremy Zawodny) Jeremy Zawodny is out with a post detailing where his search traffic comes from for his blog. Anecdotally Jeremy suggests that Google is responsible for 80% of the traffic to his blog. In my case it’s significantly higher. In fact, from a random sampling of the most recent 3,000 search generated referrals to my site, Google is responsible for over 97%.
Much of the Google traffic comes specifically through Google Image Search where my photographs seem to rank extremely high. I get virtually no traffic from either Yahoo! or MSN’s Image Search. It is still a mystery to me why I rank so high in Google’s image search but seem to get zero image search traffic from either MSN or Yahoo! Of all people, I’d quite frankly expect more from Yahoo! as they have access to my Flickr image stream where I have over 2,500 images all creative commons licensed at this point.
Jeremy suggests that there are two possible reasons to explain why he gets more traffic from Google than the publicly available market share numbers:
1. People who use Google are more likely to be searching for content that’s on my site.
and
2. The market share numbers are wrong. Google actually generates more traffic than has been reported and MSN and AOL have been over-estimated.
My own suspicion is that both may hold a little truth.
I’d also add that I think Google especially ranks blogs high. I’m not sure the reasoning behind this but I find that frequently if I write about something it ends up on Google’s first or second page search results for a given term. Also if I write something it seems to end up indexed really, really quickly. I can write something today and then find it ranked really high tomorrow.
Other factors that could come into play in my case are that I use Blogger (a Google property) to publish and much of the Image Search traffic comes through images hosted at Hello Picasa (another Google property).
I think because of my image search ranking at Google that Google’s superiority is exaggerated in my case, but still, damn impressive on their part. It’s as if every other search company doesn’t even matter anymore.