Search engine hits: a logfile analysis

I get most of my website hits on two posts: Yahoo Mail Problems and Using JAAS for Authentication and Authorization. It’s common knowledge that if your business “does not rank in the top 20 spots on the major search engines, you might as well be in the millionth ranking spot”, but that’s apparently not strictly true for content. I looked at my webserver logs over a 42 hours stretch, when I got 125 hits from search engines, and looked at the start parameter, which generally indicates what page the results were on (0 is typically the first 10 results, 10 is the second 10, etc).

Here’s the graph of my results:

I have to admit I’m suprised by the number of hits beyond the first 20 results (columns 0 and 1)… 71.2% were from the first two pages, but that measn that 28.8% were from deeper in the search engine results. And someone went all the way to page 20–looking for a “servlet free mock exam” if you must know.

Interesting, for sure. Not that I’m claiming this is a long tail.