number of referals coming from google compared to other referers?

Google supplies 70% of my referals at the momnent is that too high?

[pieman]

Google supplies 70% of my referals at the momnent is that too high? Am i putting all of our eggs in one basket or is that the 'market' share that google have at the moment? (in fact in the last few days I have seen a surge with google suppling 75% of referals as traffic from them has gone up 50%
Yahoo are second with 16
MSN 4.5%
Lycos 2.7%
Ask Jeeves 2.6%
AOL 2.1%
AltaVista 1.5%
then a few for the rest.

Thanks for any advice (even if it is this has been asked a lot ;)) I have looked through the faq and didn't see anything about it.

Pieman

[vitaplease]

pieman,

As far as I am concerned, for larger (plus 300 pages) sites in English, 70% to 80% Search Engine referals from Google and its partners, is sadly (for the other search engines and for your eggs risk) normal.

Of course you can always alter your referal statistics by paying for them ;)

See also this thread: [webmasterworld.com...]

and welcome to these forums (very addictive to more than 70% of the members and the best basket to risk your time with).

[soapystar]

actually its more than 70% since yahoo and aol use google results!....youre lucky....my site gets 90% from google..scary isnt it!

[MHes]

Hi

Speaking of referers...

Your google referers may be a lot lot higher than you think!

Stopping proxy server cache is not easy as proxy servers do not parse html. Therefore, especially with static pages, if you have a no cache tag this is ignored, and only applies to a browser anyway. This means at traffic levels of 500 views per page per day, you lose HALF of the pageviews to ISP proxy servers.

Now, the argument about dynamic pages versus static. We all know the post " I changed to dynamic and I get more traffic, it must be ok".... Wrong... dynamic pages will often not be cached by a proxy server because of the expiry date, and so the ip referers on your stats will be more accurate. If you have a static page site, you need to put a http header instruction with a minus date on to make the page be out of date and thus not cached.

I suspect many isp's go to great lengths to cache everything they can because it saves them time and money.

This can explain a lot of things, including page views to visitor ratio. If a site has a static home page and then dynamic pages, the visitor count will be lower than reality to the home page, but the pageviews will be closer to reality, showing a way higher pageview per visitor count than is the truth.

So, factor in the different ways isp deal with cache e.g. AOL users can appear as a different ip for every page they view.... plus different types of site design...some cache friendly, some not and you come to the conclusion that almost all site stats are hopelessly inaccurate and you cannot compare different sites performance by their stats.

So referers from google? Who knows.....you may be getting lots from elsewhere but do not know it.

[pieman]

Thanks for all your replies, most informative and welcoming(which is what I expected having looked at the forum for a day before posting).

It is a worry having so much traffic tied up with google listing problems can and do occour.

MHes your comment about caching is particularly intresting I will try setting the cache date out of date on my static home page and look at the results. I used to have it as a dynamic (albit it pure html) page but that tended to cause the 'cheap' shared webhosting to hang.

thanks again

Pieman