Who are all you People?
Tramping over the flowerbeds, messing up the front porch, and sticking a big spike in my previously smooth and uneventful traffic logs?
What's that? Jeff Atwood sent you? Sounds like a dodgy character to me.
Well OK. You can look aound if you like. Just clean up after yourselves, that's all. And don't eat anything from the kitchen. You'll regret it.
Thank you for the introduction to the Coding Horror blog.
I have to say, however, that I get as much traffic from the Windows Live! engine as from Google, although those referrals tend to be automated and based on the searchstring “election”.
I wonder if that’s a difference between the technical audience for Coding Horror, who go out and choose a search engine, and a non-technical audience (I’m guessing) for Pundit’s Guide who use the default search engine in their browser?
Although I’m not sure what you mean by automated – who is automating?
Yep, Jeff sent me, and I’m glad he did.
I just subscribed to your feed and I’ve spent almost the entire day reading your blogs on ‘The Long Tail’.
Actually, maybe I’m not so glad Jeff sent me…. where did all that time go?
Hi Tomslee,
Yeah, I didn’t explain that very well did I. It’s because when I look at the access logs I’m not really sure what’s going on myself.
In the access logs I can tell the difference between real live visitors to the site (they hit a page which then also requests the stylesheet and supporting files and graphics, etc.), and the bots that scrape the site for various search engines like Google, Yahoo Slurp, Ask Jeeves/Teoma, FAST Enterprise Crawler, DotBot, and about 5 others (they seem to be able to grab the page without any of those supporting files).
Then there are these weird entries from IP addresses starting with 65.55.107.xxx that kind of looked like search engine bot hits (because they did not retrieve any supporting files), but were all associated with a searchstring of “election” as though Microsoft was doing a regular subject-specific scrape (maybe for a subscription, or some other purpose). For example:
http://search.live.com/results.aspx?q=election
However this is a bit different from what is being written about here (i.e., visitors who click through from a search at a search engine). There most of my visits do come from Google (and most people wind up at my site that way because they were Googling the name of one of the candidates).
As to your guesses about the kinds of audiences (technical vs. non-technical) that might generate those different patterns, remember that I have a VERY high readership from federal government IP addresses. Nearly everyone there has one version or another of IE installed (a LOT still run IE 6.x, for example, which means my CSS takes a lot of extra care, and I still don’t have it right for IE 7.x). And I bet the Google Toolbar is not installed in many larger departmental installations of IE. So, yes, probably a lot of traffic comes from the IE/MSN search error redirection page that way, rather than Google.
Thanks for your interest.