Yesterday this site has had a two-hundred fold increase in the number of visitors compared to the norm. Without knowing it, I hit a jackpot. I wrote an article in Japanese on the Vancouver Games, and it seems to be sitting nicely at the top of Google search results for certain queries. I wasn’t expeting to do so well, so it has been a bit of a shock. The numbers should drop in a few days to the normal range.
It is quite interesting to see whence these visitors come. Most of the traffic come from search engines, and Google dominates among them. It is perhaps not surprising given Google owns Blogger, but the inflow of traffic started almost immediately after the publication of the article. Two days later, I’m starting to see a few visitors via Bing. But nothing yet from Yahoo! I’ve checked Yahoo! Site Explorer, and it isn’t yet indexed, so given the topicality of the post, it may be too late when the article shows up in the results.
This more or less confirms what I have experienced for the past year or so. Google is mighty quick in including posts after their publication in its search engine results. Bing is an odd one, since sometimes it is extremely quick to reflect updates, but other times, articles never show up in the results. Yahoo! is slow but sure. It very rarely includes updates quickly after publication, but after a fortnight to a month, it includes almost everything.
Given Google’s global dominance in search, you may think that I’m ‘losing’ only a fraction of potential readers, but that’s actually not true for Japan. In Japan, Yahoo! is still the biggest search engine, a major portal site and an internet auction site. Yahoo! Japan has done very well to lock its visitors, since it’s possible to do a wide range of things on one site and using one ID. For that reason, some SEO people think it more important to concentrate on Yahoo! than Google in Japan.
I shall enjoy the increased traffic while it lasts, and then it will go back to good old, sedated, blogging.