Google WebMaster report about EduTechWiki April 2011
Posted by Daniel Schneider on July 4 2011 at 5:40 p.m.
Last night I submited a little last-minute piece about EduTechWiki to EdMedia 2011 and finished a more difficult design/research piece as co-author that we started writing well before. The submitted article on Mediawikis aks the very simple question how MediaWikis should be configured for educational and other academic purposes. But today I thought that I might have a look at data that show how EduTechWiki is seen by the Google search engine. I'll probably write another post about Google's Analytics view.
EduTechWiki pages get undeserved high search page rankings. Of the 623 pages included in the statistics, the average is 7.4. I mean, I am proud enough about the beast as a whole but I am talking about individual pages here....
Method:
- I downloaded the .cvs files from Google webmaster tools
- I declared all values marked "<10" as missing.
- Period: March 11-April 10 2010 (unfortunately the free version only allows to get statistcs for the last month)
The following histogram shows a skewed distribution. Median of a typical position in a search page is 6.2.
Read on for some more details ...
Click through (CTR) is what I would call "normal", i.e. typically one out of five person will actually click on the link.
Looking further, I wondered whether one could identify emerging clusters looking at three variables only:
- Average position: ... in Google search pages that show a page.
- Impressions: how many times the page was viewed
- Click-though rate (CTR): how many times in % a person click on the link when it showed on the search page
Then, since some pages may never show up, I looked the other way round. What kind of queries are popular and lead to one of our pages. Clusters don't relate to page contents as far as I can tell from having a look at the raw data. But it's interesting to see that less popular subjects get a better click-through rate. Now so-called web site reference specialists will start spamming low profile pages. Actually my really big pleasure from these data is that I beat these guys without even doing anything to show up high in google searches. I do hate most of these reference people, since they pay people to manually spam my wikis and since they pollute the web with fake web sites. Look, it's simple: If you want to get high search rankings, produce two things: (1) relevant contents or good products and services, then (2) wait some month. If you sell socks for example, please write a really good tutorial on various socks. It's that simple.
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