Myself and John have been keeping an eye on various web statistics over the past seven days. With my blog averaging around 100 hits a day for the week, it was interesting to note, via Statcounter, the high percentage of visitors who stick around for 10 seconds or less, whether its not what they’re looking for, or not what they want to look at.
The latter raises a point covered by CNN.com where users/browsers/surfers etc can judge your website in the blink of an eye, actually quicker than that.
In just a brief one-twentieth of a second — less than half the time it takes to blink — people make aesthetic judgments that influence the rest of their experience with an Internet site.
The study was published in the latest issue of the Behaviour and Information Technology journal. The author said the findings had powerful implications for the field of Web site design.
Very interesting stuff indeed. My NFLView.com blog (which, coincidentally is being redesigned this weekend) seems to get visitors to stick around a little longer, different audience, different country, different topic, different blog design. The next week of stat-tracking should be interesting as I notice my own content starting to build.
My question – you arrive at two websites that have the same content you’re looking for. Why do you choose one over the other, if the content remains the same?
They could be spiders or robots.. The only way to be sure is to check the actual raw logs. Someone else brought up a similar issue here:
http://forum.search.ie/t59-making-your-site-sticky.html
It would be interesting to see what other people are seeing
You know… I never thought of robots or spiders or any other creepy crawly or mechanical creature that keeps search engines up to date.
Thanks for the tipoff on the forum post. Interesting that the point was raised just yesterday too. Time to see what the server’s logs can pull up for me.
Yeah ken.. its ok..
i suppose.. 🙁
Are you talking about the stats, or giving out bout the new means of security? 🙂
Ken – I emailed you about the captcha, but your mailserver isn’t accepting my mail!
I’d recommend trying IOError Bad Behavior plugin over captcha
Weird…. I got your email fine, just after 12:35. Sure if its not one thing its the other. IOError plugin eh? I like the sound of it… string matching, regex matching, integrates into virtually any PHP application…
I’ll mark it down as one to explore in the morning!
Very interesting post Ken, I’ve noticed spider/crawler hits to be ones just coming direct from google with no querystring, they’re not that frequent. Still a large percentage of people move on very quickly. Time to rethink my design again perhaps. More white is always good:D
You have to love the white, hell, I’d stare at http://my.kenmc.com all day because its so pretty!
Bots aside, it still makes for a high percentage of visitors that turn away. I’m hoping that the new design of NFLView.com will keep people a little more grounded once they get to the site, even if its just to break that 5-10 second barrier.
As Michele says, probably (ro)bots. A number of browsers will also “prefetch” a page in anticipation of the user going to that page.