Vanessa Fox. Nude.

When I started this blog, I promised to share the evolution of the site’s progress: stats, visitors, search engine traffic, who made me cookies, how the cats liked blogging, just how much you all search for porn, etc.

June was an interesting month.

Someone suggested I may have changed jobs in a extreme link-baiting experiment. I said the site would be an experiment, not, you know, my whole life. Although we are quickly moving into the sci-fi realm of completely merged online and offline life, and you know I am fully in favor, but I may want to start running some ads and making some money before I try drastic link bait like that.

The quickie version

• I’m keeping the domain name. Sure, I’m disappointing the 43% of my visitors who are looking for the literally nude, but maybe they’ll find my rants about ipods and working out so riveting, they’ll completely forget they were looking for porn. Hey, it could happen!
• Nearly all my traffic is still coming from links rather than search engines. I’m getting a few hits from people irritated with their Blackberries. But otherwise, search engine traffic is from all of you looking for “mr nude trucker” and “I want to see nude pictures”. And well, there was that one search for “nude blackberry”. I don’t know what that’s all about.
• If you want a traffic spike, you just might try changing jobs. Just sayin’.

The long, rambling version: now with more porn queries!

The lessons are these:

• Unlike me, choose a topic. If you care about search engine traffic, you should probably target the topics of your blog a little better than I do so the search engines can get a good sense of what your blog is about. I’m mostly in this thing for the writing, so I’ll just keep babbling along that way I have been.
• Try to get anchor text for something other than your domain name. Your URL and anchor text seem to be pretty strong signals. Mostly people link to this site with my name or site name. I don’t have much anchor text that’s descriptive of the posts being linked to. As a result, I mostly come up in searches for my name and site name, not the topics in my posts. It’s difficult to control anchor text because people are going to link to you however they like, and really, you want to be grateful for the link, not all whiny about details, but if someone describes a post with the phrase, “vanessa fox talks about Anya’s bunny fear”, linking the words “Anya’s bunny fear” will likely help the post come up for the myriad of people searching for that more than linking to “vanessa fox”. Oh, you know you want to know about Anya’s bunny fear. You were probably just doing a search for that yesterday. You can likely help things by being descriptive in internal anchors and using descriptive titles that external sites might then use for anchor text.
• Yes, Virginia, links are for traffic too! Dude, links are good for traffic, not just PageRank. Really. 59% of my traffic in June was from referring sites. 13.5% was from direct visits and 27.5% was from search engines. And of that search engine traffic? Nearly 44% was for “nude” and those searchers stayed on the site an average of 7 seconds. The rest of the queries were either for some variation of my name or some variation of nudity. Or both. Mostly the porn searchers saw my announcement about not offering pictures and abandoned the site. Although interestingly, I did gain a few readers. People looking for “blog nude” stayed on the site an average of 1:35. And those looking for “working out in the nude” stayed an average of 1:10.
• Microsoft may overtake in search any day now. This may shock and amaze you, but most people use Google to search. I got 4500 visits from Google searchers. The surprising thing was that MSN came second. MSN and Live are listed separately in Google Analytics, but between them, I had 150 visitors. Something labeled “search” (search.com?) was next at 95 visits, followed by AOL at 85. Yahoo sent only 27 and Ask sent 2.

Overall traffic
I had 14,215 visitors in June, compared to 4,916 in May. I would like to say that my writing is just that damn interesting, but I feel outside factors may have been at work, particularly this little post. And indeed, June 14th was by far the busiest day. My subscriber numbers slowly rose throughout the month, going from 237 on June 5th to 425 on June 29th.



Referrals
The top referring sites were:

1. Matt
2. Google blog
3. SEOmoz
4. Techmeme
5. Threadwatch
6. Search Engine Land
7. WebmasterWorld

Content
Other than the home page, the pages with the most page views by far were my post about leaving Google and my about page. Nothing else even came close. I guess you weren’t as interested in my MacGyver-style skills at tying ropes.

Keywords
I really only got people searching for four things:

• porn
• me
• Blackberry problems
• social networking frustrations

Someone was searching for “I like being nude”. Well, who doesn’t! And “nude welding”? I dunno. I think that might be dangerous.

I checked webmaster tools (such a nice program, that. I bet the team that works on it is really cool.) to see the queries that bring up the site in the results when the searcher didn’t click, since I can’t get that from my own logs, and I found this interesting little query: “only people with no lives spend their days looking through google search logs of course only people with no lives leave loaded messages in google search logs so i guess “we re” even”. There’s got to be a story there.