ArticlesI did some serious analysis of OddThinking’s traffic.
Here are some quick conclusions:
1) My regular readers are far more selective about which articles they read than I thought. They are not hungry omnivores – they are choosy about which articles they read. The teasers are therefore more important than I thought – I will put a bit more time into them.
2) The impact of search-engines is much faster than I had considered. A reference article (full of juicy search-terms) gets an almost instant boost compared to a search-engine resistant story. I thought the impact of search engines would take time – about a week for the content to be collected and processed and work its way up the page-rank.
3) The impact of search-engines is much stronger than I had considered. I thought after the initial week of regular-reader-dominated-traffic, it would take about six to twelve months for the long tail of searchers to double the amount of traffic.
In fact, only 11% of posts fit this profile by taking longer than 25 weeks to match the first week’s traffic. A corresponding 11% of search-engine-friendly posts have already doubled by the 4th week.
If I all wanted was to be read (which isn’t actually my goal), I should target the searchers more frequently.
Comment by Aristotle Pagaltzis on May 3, 2006
Chris Anderson of “Long Tail†fame just wrote about that in Google and the Long Tail of Time.
Personally, I read every single post and am also subscribed to the comments feed; so rather than better abstracts I’d really prefer having a fulltext feed.