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
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