Community Matters

Lately traffic on this blog has gone up quite a bit (more than quadrupled over the last couple of months). And the main driver of all these new visitors? Google.

More than 90% of the readers of this blog come from search now (up from less than 40% in December) and again more than 90% of the search hits come from Google.

Looking at the traffic and at the actual searches that got people to my blog brings some surprising results:

• My own blog is the 162nd hit when you are searching for dirk hohndel blog. WTF?
• When being less specific (searching for hohndel blog) it shows up as the fourth result (and in Google’s defense, two of the three higher ranked results are my blog at work)
• On the other hand this blog is the top result for queries like eeepc competitor or motorola ming leopard.

Which brings me back to the title of this post – even though this is clearly my blog (the posts are authored by “Dirk” and the domain is “Hohndel.org”) and even though I write about lots of things here, most of the people who get here through Google are not looking for me but for information on a small subsets of the topics that I post about. And a change in Google’s ranking (which I can’t really influence, can I?) will completely change the amount of people coming to this site and the topics that they might be interested in. Something to think about.

So besides silly search engine optimization tools – is there an easy way to fix the fact that searching for my name doesn’t get you here? Here’s one idea: if you happen to have a blog or site yourself… would you mind adding a link named “Dirk Hohndel’s blog” which points to the entry page of this blog (so something like <a href="http://www.hohndel.org/communitymatters">Dirk Hohndel's blog</a>)? And drop me a line if you did (I’ll happily add a link here in this post back to you). I want to try these searches again in a few weeks and see if the rankings respond…