Last week I asked readers about their biggest sources of traffic to their blogs.
The results reveal a fairly striking winner – Google.
The comparison between Google and ‘Other Search Engines’ was fairly amazing – but what did interest me was the number of bloggers reporting Social Media sites as their number 1 source of traffic (15%). I’m sure if I’d asked this same question 18 months ago that they would have barely registered on the results.
My main source is definitely social network sites like stumbleupon. This does not surprise me as this is the easiest way to go for new blogs as Google plays favorites.
Justin Smestad
http://www.resourcefulidiot.com
Guess the social media sites are growing in popularity.
Not a big surprise that most of my visitors come from search engines, or should I say Google..
Why does Google score this high, while the other search engines are poo, to say the least?
It is a true that Social Media plays a bigger role for bloggers when compared to last year. On the other hand, the traffic coming through Social Media sites rarely bring me loyal readers. When traffic comes to your site without focused intent, it bounces. Usually 75% of all unfocused visitors leave within three seconds. We should seriously work on converting bouncers…
Well, Naomi Dunford theorizes that we already killed social media, so these numbers, according to her, should be on their way down.
http://ittybiz.com/how-we-killed-social-media/
But I’m not sure I agree with her.
Yup, for me Google is over 40% too.
Hi Darren,
One of my site is also close to your statistics, 47.11% from Google, 31.81% direct and the rest is refersals.
I do not understand why Yahoo and MSN do not bother to change their search algorithms. It would be so wonderful to get at least half the amount of traffic I get from Google from both Yahoo and MSN. Right now, if you combine the two, they are close to a whopping 5% of Google’s traffic! Why, why, why?
I was one of those who stated that social media sites are my number one source of traffic. In fact, well over half of my traffic comes from Reddit. I’m quite a prolific contributor/commentor on there and every so often slip in one of my own articles if I feel it might be of interest. Usually timely stuff, although yesterday I just spoofed another entry that was currently in the Reddit top five, and this generated quite a reasonable amount of traffic.
The above is the secret in a nutshell – these places don’t mind if you submit your own stuff as long as that’s not ALL you do. I would guess my ratio is about 10:1, where I submit ten others for every one of mine. I don’t even bother with the other social media sites anymore as I found them largely to be a waste of time (at least, in terms of traffic generation).
Does the google traffic come from natural listings or paid listings?
Google is King!
With several blogs, I find that Google on average sends 60-70% of my traffic. I would like to increase other traffic sources ;but, Google traffic is pretty steady so long as you follow the basic rules of blogging.
I listed Google as my #1 traffic source and I’ve never done any paid links. Its almost all to one post as well. So if you write a post that is a hot button issue or topic then Google can really boost your traffic to that specific post
This pretty much falls in line with what I’m seeing on Google Analytics. What’s amazing is how little search engine traffic is coming from other sources.
Well as i told earlier that Google is the best and after that the regional social bookmarking sites are doing great for my blogs.
Regards
Shaan Haider
Would be awesome if you did some new posts on Search Engine optimization for google.
Most of my readers come from Google- and are looking for real information (what I mean is educational tidbits) on vintage items and collectibles. It never ceases to amaze me when I see a number of people coming back months later to these older posts.
I think my regular readers (who are a select few) stay around for my “more off the wall posts.”
Hi Darren,
My stats are a little bit different. I get the largest number of visitors from quality forums such as WebHostingTalk and from other sites and networks related to my blog topics. Google holds 5th place in my referals’ list.
Great Post, this is very valuable information for people who do not track their traffic and for those who want to compare their numbers to the rest of the world. I did not participate in the survey, but my top source of traffic is Google.com
i am pretty shock other search engine is so low.
more folks use yahoo then google
Google delivers the majority of traffic to all of my sites (blogs/resources/portals) as well. There are a few, however, that are seeing much more growth due to social networking – my entrepreneurial blog and my mom blog in particular.
Data points,
Barbara
what are social media sites? thank you
The interesting one is #2 on the chart. Google is pretty much a given but the social networking looks like it keep getting bigger in the pie
Wow, I’m not getting any traffic from Google yet! (My site is only about a month old). About how long would everyone say it took for Google to top your list?
Currently I’m getting almost all my traffic from networking, link building, and social networks.
Def Social-media is the highest source of my traffic, Stumbleupon has been sending me traffic since last Nov.
However over the last few months and continued work I’m increasing the number of visits from Google as well as direct traffic…
I’ve never had big traffic come from digg or reddit
I really want to learn how to use social networking to boost the traffic to my site. At the moment I just dont know how to do it, so this is being wasted for my blog. If you could teach us how to use it and use it well that would be great.
Although Google still brings the vast majority of our traffic, Social Media is fast gaining in total percentage of traffic generated
Google sends about 70% of all visitors to my sites. I think social networking will be better in a few years in Europe.
Since I blogged in Thai language, my blog are always in the Google first page. It takes just only few hours to be listed though. However Google is only 20% of my sources; not many people Google in Thai; how’s ironic.
Most of my traffics are from the blogs which I left my comments.
Social media sites share is already 15%…Wonder how much it will be in another 18 months…(Double??)
Thats great. But am not getting traffic from google yet. Mine is just One month old blog.
I agree with these results. I believe that most traffic to bllogs or other web sites comes mainly from Google. And this just proves that Google is really “king” of internet :)
Really nice chart by the way :)
It makes you wonder why Microsoft would think that Yahoo is worth over 40 billion.
Live From Las Vegas
The Masked Millionaire
I’ve been reading your posts about blog promotion. I’ve been in search of blog directories to help my site out. So far I’ve used MyBlogLog. The search continues!
I for one welcome our dark overlords – Google.
It’s definitely Google for me. It’s interesting to see what search terms people enter with. It’s often things I wouldn’t expect
Google number may be higher than the others because more people optimize for it. Google looks primarily at post titles, HTML titles and the first 100-150 characters of the description.
It seems to me that Yahoo and MSN focus more on the meta tags and descriptions. We should all be optimizing for Yahoo and MSN as well as Google.
I’ve been searching for diversity in traffic sources. The majority has so far been Google searches for my Ubuntu Linux howtos.
all my blogs combined Google makes up 33% of my traffic, but diggactually outranks google on my two newest sites. Overall Digg is 22% of all my traffic. Of course using the WP/LJ crossposter draws in another 15% Those excerpts are traffic I don’t even have to work for besides putting myself into the friend finding forums on occasion.
Nice Report Darren,
Google, Champion and Yahoo,MSN and AOL staying
in the game. I’m still testing the Impact that Google Me -Beloved is going to have. This was a new search tool
with Movie released on April 25, 2008. This is more than
meets the eye, Be Blessed always…Peace!
No doubt, google definitely has a big chunk of the market and this shows why. And yes, social networking site are also gaining pace. Sites like del.icio.us, stumbleupon, digg, reddit, facebook, myspace and tons of others.
I’m curious about the “repeat visitors/subscribers” percentage. Does this mean that 11% of RSS feed subscribers returning to the blog itself? Or are 11% of the articles read, either on site or in feed reader or in syndication, attributed to subscribers? In my experience, feed readers account for a greater percentage of articles read than this.
Google Rocks.
I guess main source should be social networking and other popular blogs. Relevant incoming links bring in more traffic.
In regards to traffic, which is better, quantity or quality?
it is looking very strange to see that other search engines only 1% , It just shows how the google is ruling search engine world
I dont think so, it depends upon the Blogger and his Blog.
About what he write and moreover how active he is in Blogosphere. If his activity is more then, other websites/blogs category will be more than the traffic from Google.
Google is really “king” of internet traffic.
Get popular content out on social media like StumbleUpon and people will pay attention and subscribe. Get popular content out on Google … and nothing. Is it any wonder that SU is way more appealing? The linkerati are far more present there.
Even better than SU, imho, is Sphinn and social news sites. There, the intent is more specific, so the traffic isn’t as “silly,” (i.e. bounces less) as Seth Godin would put it.
My sites traffic is also mostly from Google, about 41% of it, and the rest is from social networking sites, and referrals from other blogs. I must say social networking as my #2 top traffic resource came to me as a surprise, I never expected such results.
Well then that leaves me perplexed. Google doesn’t like me wasn’t always this way I used to get lots of traffic from google. Now it accounts for less than 1%. Way less :(
Most of the traffic at my blog comes from Google…bounce rate is high. But, the surprising thing is that although the traffic from other search engines like Yahoo is low…the bounce rate is very low.
Google search is the biggest source in my case and of course loyal readers from feed subscription will always the loving one’s of my content.
For those of us with fairly small blogs, I’m finding that I’m getting huge amounts of traffic from Twitter.
I’ve not even been tweeting my posts but the traffic is steadily coming.