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It's hard to say. Going off of the numbers that I have, I'd say that they do find what they are looking for, but they unless they are a JHU affiliate, they are unable to access it. Our bounce rate for Google searches is 76%. Which is not necessarily bad, because we put a lot of information on our item record pages--we don't make you dig for anything. On the other hand, 9% of visits coming to us through Google searches are return visits. To me, that says that the other 91% are not JHU affiliates, and that's 91% of Google searchers that won't have access to materials. I know from monitoring our feedback form, we have gotten in increase in requests from far flung places for access to things we have in special collections from non-affiliates. So, we get lots of exposure via searches, but due to the nature of how libraries work with subscriptions, licensing, membership and such, we close lots of doors once they get there. -Sean On 2/23/12 1:55 PM, "Schneider, Wayne" <[log in to unmask]> wrote: > This is really interesting. Do you have evidence (anecdotally or > otherwise) that the people coming to you via search engines found what > they were looking for? Sorry, I don't know exactly how to phrase this. > To put it another way - are your patrons finding you this way? > > wayne > > -----Original Message----- > From: Code for Libraries [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of > Sean Hannan > Sent: Thursday, February 23, 2012 12:37 PM > To: [log in to unmask] > Subject: Re: [CODE4LIB] Local catalog records and Google, Bing, Yahoo! > > Our Blacklight-powered catalog (https://catalyst.library.jhu.edu/) comes > up a lot in google search results (try gil scott heron circle of stone). > > Some numbers: > > 59% of our total catalog traffic comes from google searches 0.04% of our > total catalog traffic comes from yahoo searches 0.03% of our total > catalog traffic comes from bing searches > > For context, 32.96% of our total catalog traffic is direct traffic and > referrals from all of the library websites combined. > > Anecdotally, it would appear that bing (and bing-using yahoo) seem to > drastically play down catalog records in their results. We're not doing > anything to favor a particular search engine; we have a completely open > robots.txt file. > > Google regularly indexes our catalog. Every couple days or so. I haven't > checked in awhile. > > We're not doing any fancy SEO here (though, I'd like to implement some > of the microdata stuff). It's just a function of how the site works. We > link a lot of our catalog results to further searches (clicking on an > author name takes you to an author search with that name, etc). Google > *loves* that type of intertextual website linking (see also: Wikipedia). > We also have stable URLs. Search URLs will always return searches with > those parameters, item URLs are based on an ID that does not change. > > All of that good stuff doesn't help us with bing, though. ...But I'm not > really concerned with remedying that, right this moment. > > -Sean > > On 2/23/12 12:37 PM, "[log in to unmask]" > <[log in to unmask]> > wrote: > >> First of all, I'm going to say I know little in this area. I've done >> some preliminary research about search indexing (Google's) and >> investigated a few OPAC robot.txt files. Now to my questions: >> >> - Can someone explain to me or point me to research as to why local >> library catalog records do not show up in Google, Bing, or Yahoo! > search >> results? >> - Is there a general prohibition by libraries for search engines to >> crawl their public records? >> - Do the search engines not index these records actively? >> - Is it a matter of SEO/promoted results? >> - Is it because some systems don't mint URLs for each record? >> >> I haven't seen a lot of discussion about this recently and I know >> Jason Ranallo has done a lot of work in this area and gave a great >> talk at code4lib Seattle on microdata/Schema.org, so I figured this >> could be part of that continuing conversation. >> >> I look forward to being educated by you all, >> >> Tod