Search Engines and log files

Interpreting search engine results

[graywolf]

I use webtrends and get the following results this month for search engine referals

MSN - 16,946
Google - 8,797
Yahoo - 8,495

Does this mean that 16,000 people came from MSN, or is that number a combination of people who went to MSN or invoked the search embeded in IE? Currently about 95% of my visitors use some version of IE.

[makemetop]

>a combination of people who went to MSN or invoked the search embeded in IE..

You've got it. You can also add-on people who type in stuff they are looking for in the browser window too - that defaults to MSN search.

[rogerd]

If those are real numbers, it also means you are doing a disproportionate share of traffic from MSN vs. Google/Yahoo - time to start working on Google! :)

[graywolf]

Strangely enough I do more work on optimizing for google, and have better placement on google.