Hiya Neal (and others) As a counterpoint to your argument about search engines and small sites I have some real numbers:
From my website referrer stats: (For an Apache HTTP: http://www.eaves.org) Direct requests : 28% Google.com : 1.5% Google images : 0.7% search.yahoo.com : 0.3% Google.ca : 0.15% Google.co.uk : 0.15% Google.it : 0.11% Google.de : 0.09% Google.com.au : 0.08% Google.co.nz : 0.06% Google.fr : 0.03% Google.pl : 0.03% Google.nl : 0.03% altavista.com : 0.03% au.altavista.com : 0.02% The rest of the traffic is from a whole load of Java MIDlet portals. Total search engines combined: ~4% Now, I'm not running java.sun.com or anything like that but for a personal website I get an average of 30,000 hits a month, and I suspect that the only way that people find my site would be: 1. Signature links in email 2. Search engines It's not like anybody is going to be trying to guess my URL just to see what is there ;-) And the best thing is that I have a site that is just running Tomcat, on a wacky URL to compare this against: (Tomcat: http://www.eaves.org:28080/) Direct requests : 55% looksmart.com : 15% eaves.org : 9% google : 6% search.msn.com : 5% yahoo.com : 1% google.ca : 1% Now, I don't trust these numbers as much because the hits are so much lower 2000 hits a month, but it's clear in my case that there is no, or little "penalty" for whatever behaviour Tomcat might have. Of course, YMMV, batteries not includes, offer void where prohibited by law. Cheers, -- jon neal wrote:
You're comparing apples and oranges .. and pears (staying with the analogies ;-)). A high profile site of course does not need the engines to the same extent as a small site. Additionally, a small site with a mature link base (100s or 1000s of grade A links) will not recieve as much traffic from them either. For a new site (first year or so) its just the opposite. Besides, I was including places like Yahoo!, AOL, when I refer to search engine. Granted these are CPCs (fake search engines) but nonetheless google probably has 80% of the search engine market ... as for the 80% of traffic coming from search engines - its a statistic I recently read in a book. I can look it up for you if interested. If sounds though like the truth of this statistic has a lot to do with whether you're comparing apples ... oranges ... or pears. As for switching to Apache with 1hr work ... I'm also bucking that just because (a) my ISP will want to get involved and charge me hourly for the setup of an addt'l app and (b) I will have to get another $300 SSL cert from Trawte if I go that road. Sigh. Neal
-- Jon Eaves <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> http://www.eaves.org/jon/ -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> For additional commands, e-mail: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
