I’ve enabled Google Benchmarking for ww.selfcateringhols.com, my personal blog as well as this more work orientated blog and to be honest I’m quite shocked at the results of the benchmarking.
Google categorises your site as small medium or large but doesn’t tell you which category your site falls into. The beauty of having access to the stats for multiple sites is that you can (as long as they fall into different size brackets) work out which one your site falls into.
I was never under any confusion with my blogs – they receive very little traffic really, which is why I was blown away by the fact that this blog receives 217% more traffic than the benchmark small blog. Even my personal blog, which is written primarily for friends and family, and which has days without receiving a single visitor is relatively close to the benchmark. This must mean that there are an awful lot of sites out there getting little or no traffic. Bear in mind these stats only compare with other sites which have opted in to the program, so we can forget the millions of splogs out there as I doubt that the owners are really interested.
I was unsure as to which category selfcateringhols fell into until I did this comparison – it is so heavily over the benchmark that I assumed it was still categorised as small but on the verge of falling into the medium category. I was wrong, which again was a big surprise, as this tells a story of a lot of commercial sites out there receiving a lot fewer visitors than I had expected.
Diminishing returns of a Spam email
The above is a snapshot of the traffic to my site resulting from my post on a phishing email – the lows are the weekends, the highs Monday morning when they have obviously posted a fresh batch of their emails.
It’s interesting to note the diminishing returns – presumably given that Spam emails by their nature are not targeted specifically but just sent out to as many people as possible the market starts to get saturated quite quickly with people having already received the email in previous weeks and they’ve either acted upon it or taken the decision to bin it.
This process may have been hastened by the decision of one of the visitors to my site to send a link to my post to the senders of the email. I’m guessing they’ll give up on the template they have been using and will simply start off afresh with something different soon.