Growth and Surprising Results
January 23, 2006 Posted by Tyler CruzI was playing my roll of ignorant clueless newbie in #SEO on Efnet as I have been doing lately for fun, when I got into a discussion/debate, defending my belief that time is much better spent working on building a quality site than it is building up links and other SEO for them.
The discussion lead to a path that prompted me to check my referral traffic, as they didn’t believe my traffic could grow when it was largely type-in/bookmark traffic and through word of mouth as a result of being a quality site, and thought it came almost entirely from SE’s. I knew we had a large number (larger than usual) of loyal visitors who bookmarked or typed in the site, but I didn’t know it was so high and that Google accounted for hardly any of the traffic.
Before I go on, I just wanted to say that PFO has been growing very slowly but steady over the months, but I think the new design has done a lot for it, as traffic the past week has shown a consistant growth; about 1500 more per day. Yesterday it garnered 7336 uniques, and it was a Sunday (weekends always slow traffic days for me usually). Movie Vault is still growing, albeit at an unbelievably slow rate, and was at 6327 for yesterday (again, a Sunday..). Then I have all my other sites.. hell… this BLOG gets 100 uniques a day lol..
Okay, back to business, these are the surprising results for referrals to two of my sites. First, PFO:
1. (no referral) 88.35%
2.www.google.com/search 2.15%
3. search.yahoo.com/search 1.81%
and now MoVa:
1. (no referral) 67.96%
2. www.google.com/search 10.35%
3. search.yahoo.com/search 5.75%
So, wow! I had thought I was getting a MUCH larger referral traffic number from Google for PFO, but it turns out that I only get 2% from them. And nearly 90% of my traffic comes from bookmarked/type-in/loyal visitors. Yet the funny thing is that traffic is indeed still growing. Proving my theory and beliefs right. These stats taken from past 3 months.
MoVa is also doing very well. Now, I don’t know what everyone elses stats look like, but I’m assuming their (no referral) agent is nowhere near as high as mine are, but I could be horribly wrong.
Anyhow, this is great. I’m #2 or #1 on all the top search engines for “poker forums” and “poker forum” and so before, it was a worry to me what would happen if I got bumped lower, but now since I’m only getting 5-6% from SE’s (the rest from backlinks), I believe i’m very safe.
Let’s try to get an average of 10,000 uniques a day for PFO.. that’d make me happy.. we’re already getting a million page views a month for PFO…
One Response to “Growth and Surprising Results”
Thanks for posting the real world figures, Tyler, and confirming my suspicions. A lot of people trying to build or increase traffic on community-style sites are overly obsessing on Google. Google has some degree of importance, but a well organized site and good value received by visitors counts a lot more in building a customer base.
Whenever one is tempted to get too worried about Google, just keep in mind that the absolute number one search on Google is usually ‘Google’ .. so unless those totally clueless Netizens are the ones you are trying to attract, you’ll still make ago of things regardless of the fabled ‘sand box’ and all the other worrisome obstacles the “non dooers” are always writing about.