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Does your search engine do that to you? On June 24, 2007 I’ve used my weekly chapter to illustrate and ridicule the incredible idiocy of food labeling. For that I’ve scanned the ingredients label of a cereal box and included a quote of very good and appropriate comment by Andy Rooney. Currently, there are 496 pages in my weekly chapter but none of them matches the extraordinary viewing history of this page which I’ll call CLP (Cereal Label Page) for short. CLP was visited only 38 times in the first seven months, including January of 2008, but then it took off, really, reaching 647 in a single month of May of that year. More incredibly, most monthly visit- ing rates are over two hundred ever since (average is 262.9). The page is the second most visited of my website -15,547 visits till the end of 2012 (excluding traffic generated by robots, worms, or replies with special HTTP status codes), second only to my maps of mediterranean climate areas |
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[MAP1] [MAP2]. On average, it invokes 2.1 % of monthly hits, 6.9 % of monthly visits and, even more impressively, it represents 31 % of entry pages. On CLP heydays, in May of 2009, 90 % of all entry pages were CLP (!!) when CLP constituted 16.6 % of all pages visited. The monthly visiting rate variations follow the general pattern, low summer months rates that is, but even more pronounced: while general rates are typically halved in summer, SLP entry pages go down by a factor of roughly four.
In the analysis GR website in 2009, I’ve already commented that CLP is an ‘evergreen’ not easy to explain. At first I thought it’s Andy Rooney’s popularity but then I realized that CLP hits are rooted in keywords cereal labels, food labels, food ingredients, and likewise. Unfortunately, CLP does not bring an informative text on the related subject(s), so most visitors are probably disappointed and leave immediately - the assessment supported by the fact that the number of CLP exit pages is practically identical to CLP entry pages, the difference does not go higher than 0.1 % (!!).
So, why CLP stays evergreen? It must be a flaw in the web search engines. I imagine the following scenario: In the spring of 2008 food labels became hot social issue. At that time, however, web is not rich on the subject and visitors are herded to my website, to CLP. Most visitors are disappointed, of course, but the visits do count for the search engine’s ranking - and here we go, misleading browsing directions grow ever happier. It’s not fair to visitors and it’s not fair to me either, I don’t like being fooled by the false appeal of my website. If a page visit is below 10 or so seconds, a search engine should not count it as visit for the ranking purposes. That’s it.
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2013-02-03 |
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WEBSITE EDITOR:
Krešimir J. Adamić
