Wednesday, August 04, 2010

PSHSCripts.Blogspot.Com – 2 years On!

Just over 2 years ago, I created a new blog, The PowerShell Scripts blog over at http://pshscripts.blogspot.com. The idea was simple – a blog with single function PowerShell scripts. Scripts that demonstrated one (or at least a very small number) of things to do with PowerShell. I had in mind that since the blog was hosted by Google, they’d do a good job of indexing it, and providing links to it. Which is exactly what happened.
In the two years, I’ve had over 65,000 visitors to the blog. At present, I’m getting around 170 hits per day and just under 300 page hits per day on average over a week. However, this is very much a week day blog with Monday-Friday tending to be closer to 200+ hits/day during the week.
But the interesting, and gratifying, thing is the percentage of hits coming from the key search engines (Google and more recently Bing) and the search terms they are using. I’ve used a free traffic counter from sitemeter to measure the traffic, but I only see the last 1000 visitors and had not added a more permanent tracking system – but I’ve recently added Google Analytics the site. So far, the results from both sites show the same tends.
Looking at the Analytic's output for the past month. around 70% of all the traffic to the blog comes from Google and Bing with a bit more from PowerShell.com, TechNet and this blog. There are a few other search engines that send traffic, but Google and Bing are dominant.  Also, around 13% of the traffic comes from direct hits on http://pshscripts.blogspot.com
Looking at the search terms used is also interesting. PowerShell Scripts (and PowerShell script) make up 18% or all hits. Below those two, there’s a very long tail of relatively low numbers of hits over the past month. There were just around 1000 separate search terms used – and all but a handful more than once or twice. That shows that the narrow focus of each post has proven useful – you can search with a fairly narrow term, such as “PowerShell ipaddress wmi” or “powershell send udp” and see the blog at the top or near the top of the 1st page.
There were two discoveries that were curious. First, looking at the referring sites, I noticed one site had a relatively high number of pages per visit and a long time too on average time on site. The bounce rate for this traffic was also very very low. It turns out that an IT professor in Viet Nam has put a link to my blog and all the slides from the upcoming PowerShell V2 class. Not sure about the legality of putting the slides up – but see for yourself at http://hoanguyen40.ecoles.officelive.com/OSScripting.aspx.
The other amusing thing I found is that, when looking at the networks that send you traffic (think ISP). The top network listed was Microsoft!
All in all, a good first two years for this blog – getting several hundred hits a day is more than I expected.

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