Search engine referrals

The other day I was looking at our website’s stats to get an idea of search engine referral ratios. While I fully expected Google to win comprehensively, the actual figures based on the last 10,000 page views were certainly an eye-opener:

The remarkable thing is just what a huge gap there is between first and second. Also interesting is that Live/MSN are nothing more than a “very minor player” as far as our visitors are concerned and Yahoo are basically insignificant.

Does it tell us anything about users who prefer Google as opposed to those who use Live/MSN? Our experience indicates that it’s generally beginners who search the internet via Live/MSN and the more savvy users choose Google. Because we’re essentially a technical website, I fully expected significantly less traffic from Live/MSN and Yahoo but I didn’t think Google would be this far in front.

Could it be that Google favours blogs and therefore gives them more prominence? Is it also possible that the US market share numbers have been over-estimated in favour of the “smaller” players?

Posted in Business, Google, Marketing, Microsoft, SEO, Usability, Web by Ivan