October 2007, Revyu’s busiest month yet, with a total of 135,776 page requests. One interesting trend in recent months has been an overall decrease in the proportion of traffic accounted for by search engine crawlers. This is now down to around 25% of page requests, with Googlebot generating around three times as many requests as crawlers from the live.com and yahoo.net domains. We’ve also started to see more activity from archive.org and alexa.com crawlers, and a pleasing development is some more substantial crawling from Semantic Web services such as zitgist.com.

Top 20 Search Engine Queries bringing Traffic to Revyu in October 2007

• 4192 referrals: www.facebook.com
• 662 referrals: facebook.com
• 600 referrals: barn asia
• 341 referrals: www.facebook
• 153 referrals: kick and dicky
• 110 referrals: park farm bristol
• 109 referrals: cicciolina
• 105 referrals: costco milton keynes
• 97 referrals: wharfedale micro drive in ear headphones
• 97 referrals: 971 the river
• 96 referrals: brazilian club london
• 93 referrals: goosync review
• 88 referrals: barn asia newcastle
• 69 referrals: canon d400
• 69 referrals: wavendon arms milton keynes
• 68 referrals: the wavendon arms
• 66 referrals: barn asia newcastle upon tyne
• 63 referrals: goosync
• 62 referrals: las iguanas milton keynes
• 61 referrals: costco mk

The results are remarkably similar to last month, with regulars such as facebook, barn asia, park farm bristol, goosync and 971 the river well represented. The notable new entries are cicciolina and the recently opened Las Iguanas in Milton Keynes.

There are too many queries at the end of the long tail to report in this blog post, but I’m entertained to see someone searching for “dodgy restaurants and fast food” – I can’t think of a better use for Revyu than that. Unfortunately the first result on Google for this query is a link to the Revyu page about the excellent Indian Fast Food Restaurant and Takeaway, Cotham, Bristol. This is a great example of how keyword-based searching will never be the answer to all our information seeking needs. For anyone looking for excellent indian food in Cotham, Bristol, rest assured that the “bring your own booze” Indian Fast Food will also serve you up a great meal.

Continuing the Doodz-n-Chyx-inspired series, here are the…

Top 20 Search Engine Queries bringing Traffic to Revyu in September 2007

• 3971 referrals: www.facebook.com
• 613 referrals: barn asia
• 146 referrals: www.facebook com
• 136 referrals: barn asia newcastle
• 107 referrals: www.facebook
• 85 referrals: brazilian club london
• 80 referrals: kick and dicky
• 77 referrals: jbl platinum series
• 76 referrals: goosync
• 76 referrals: park farm bristol
• 75 referrals: goosync review
• 73 referrals: 971 the river
• 70 referrals: wavendon arms
• 63 referrals: wharfedale micro drive in ear headphones
• 59 referrals: barn asia newcastle upon tyne
• 54 referrals: park farm bristol airport
• 51 referrals: park farm parking
• 50 referrals: wavendon arms wavendon
• 50 referrals: wavendon arms milton keynes
• 44 referrals: review anything

I still don’t understand why so many people search for a Web address like www.facebook.com, but I guess for some people Google is the Address Bar. The list is also oddly similar to last month. Partly for that reason (although partly because of time admittedly) I’ve not linked each query back to the associated item on Revyu. Would I just be contributing to a “rich get richer” situation? Does that matter when it’s a zero sum game Revyu vs other sites, not one entry on Revyu vs another? Probably not. I’ll chew this over and decide again next month.

Again the long tail is interesting (perhaps next month I’ll publish the bottom 20). My personal favourite is “quality of kite sold at aldi”. Just 1 referral, but glad to see Revyu being used for what it was designed.

The weekly email update I receive about new content on the awesome Kewl Doodz’n'Chyx blog includes a short list of search terms that have brought people to the blog in the past week. Inspired by this I thought I’d do something similar with Revyu and publish a list of the top search terms bringing people to the site each month.

You folks all work hard to write reviews but never have any idea if anyone’s actually reading them. Well the good news is that people are. In fairly impressive numbers. The list below shows the top 20 search terms bringing people to site from external search engines in August 2007. In that month the site received an average of 3765 page requests per day, and passed through the milestone of half a million total page requests since launch in November 2006; not bad traffic from a relatively modest 475 reviews I reckon.

Top 20 Search Engine Queries bringing Traffic to Revyu in August 2007

• 633 referrals: www.facebook.com
• 374 referrals: barn asia
• 217 referrals: barn asia newcastle
• 144 referrals: www.facebook
• 137 referrals: goosync
• 83 referrals: goosync review
• 76 referrals: 971 the river
• 74 referrals: helix apartments seattle
• 67 referrals: wharfedale micro drive in ear headphones
• 62 referrals: jbl platinum series
• 62 referrals: helix apartments
• 57 referrals: park farm bristol
• 54 referrals: hotel particulier montmartre
• 52 referrals: the garage wolverton
• 49 referrals: brazilian club london
• 45 referrals: review anything
• 44 referrals: kick and dicky
• 44 referrals: wavendon arms
• 41 referrals: www.facebook com
• 40 referrals: park farm parking bristol

It’s pretty interesting to see what’s on people’s minds, and I hope that these figures give you some encouragement and assurance that your views are actually read. For those Web2.0 fanatics among you, or those of you whose reviews aren’t covered by the search terms above, be assured that there’s a really long tail on this data (i.e. there are many queries that have led to traffic on Revyu just one or two times). Right at the end with just one referral is “fratboy tags”. I can’t think why.