website analytics

I look from time-to-time at the statistics of my sites, always a little curious about who is making it here and why.

I used to have a higher score from Google, but a massive re-design a few years back (when I started using PicsFromTrips) destroyed my ranking and neither site has built up much reputation since.

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That said, I do get a fair amount of traffic to PicsFromTrips, which makes sense as it’s a fairly keyword rich site with LOTS of images. I enjoy when I see that someone has found my site through a keyword search on Google and that they’ve stayed to check out related photos.  From time to time I’ve even been contacted by people traveling to the same destination asking questions about this or that.

What amazes me though is when I see abnormal spikes in my keyword traffic – like I did recently, due to, of all things, Semana Santa in Spain.  In 2001 I was fortunate enough to be in Spain for the festivities and I took a few (not particularly great) photos of some of the events.  For whatever reason, Google has opted to place me at the top of the search results for the phrase “procession madrid.”   I’m not sure why.  I don’t rank on Semana Santa Madrid or Semana Santa Procession even though the page is titled Semana Santa Procession Madrid.  I suppose “Procession Madrid” is a more generic term with less people targeting that term.

My amazement comes from the fact that I can rank so high against some terms and so low against others – I know that the logic behind search engine ranking is a dark art but still I can’t help but wonder.

In addition, I find that while I see spikes in individual terms, overall the traffic never spikes that far – so while I get a lot of visits from these temporary keywords, I can only summise that I’m giving up traffic on some of the lesser trafficed keywords, keeping the overall traffic pattern pretty stable.  Which doesn’t seem right to me.  Shouldn’t I experience larger overall traffic accompanying these keyword spikes?  It seems like Google has deemed my site worthy of sending some stable amount of traffic, and when that’s overly sampled with certain keywords I get less from others.  I don’t really think that’s true.. but could it be possible?

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