Log Wallowing

After fixing the small problems I mentioned in Favorite Icons and MSPaint Adventures, I became curious about other statistics that my World Championship site log might reveal for the month of February. My server host gives me detailed daily stats or global stats covering three months, but not monthly stats. The daily stats only show if a minimum number of search terms, for example, are used on that day, meaning that unusual searches are lost in the noise.

Like most web sites these days, my top external referrer is Google. The following table shows which pages received the most traffic from Google. For example, my 'World Chess Championship' index page had 538 visitors from many different Google domains combined.

538 The World Chess Championship
356 1972 Fischer - Spassky Title Match : Highlights
331 2010 Anand - Topalov
140 1992 Fischer - Spassky Rematch : Highlights
100 2010 Candidates Event
  94 The Origin of Chess (*)
  94 Sicilian Defense - 2...e6 Variations (*)
  82 1995 Kasparov - Anand PCA Title Match : Highlights
  80 World Chess Championship : Computer Chess
  59 Positional Play : Piece Placement and Chess Strategy (*)
  59 1984 Karpov - Kasparov Title Match : Highlights
  59 1993 Kasparov - Short PCA Title Match : Highlights
  59 World Chess Championship : Three star games

It would be helpful to see what keywords people are using to find some of those pages, like the '2010 Candidates Event' or 'Sicilian Defense - 2...e6 Variations'. I was surprised to find out that dozens of visitors for the main 'World Chess Championship' home page are finding it after searches on variations of 'mark weeks chess' or even just 'mark weeks', including spellings like 'weekes' and 'wiicks'. I especially liked the search term 'mark weeks chess champion'; if only I really was!

The pages marked '(*)' are articles that I recovered after writing for About.com (for more about these see Posts with label About.com). I'm interested in these because, unlike the specialist World Championship pages, they are general interest chess pages and I'm unsure about spending any further effort on them.

  94 The Origin of Chess
  94 Sicilian Defense - 2...e6 Variations
  59 Positional Play : Piece Placement and Chess Strategy
  54 Award Winning Chess Books
  52 Chess Bibliography
  47 Chess in the Middle Ages
  45 Chess Traps : View Full Games
  35 Positional Play : Pawn Structure
  32 Openings - Introduction to 1.d4
  27 Elementary endgames (Part 2)
  27 Chess Openings - Unusual First Moves

Two of the those top-10 pages -- 'The Origin of Chess' and 'Chess in the Middle Ages' -- are related to chess history, a subject which appears to rank favorably with openings and improvement.

I also noticed more traffic coming from Wikipedia than I'd expected. It looks like people do click through the references at the bottom of a Wikipedia page, something which I rarely do.

139 The World Chess Championship
  31 1985 Kasparov - Karpov Title Match : Highlights
  28 World Chess Championship : FIDE Events 1948-1990
  26 World Chess Championship for Women
  19 1984 Karpov - Kasparov Title Match : Highlights

There is a lot more that I could say about the February log, but I'll come back to the subject using another month at some time in the future.