This is the 1500th blog post at microBEnet! I figured I’d take this chance to reflect a bit and look up some stats for anyone who might be interested. First the easy stuff:
Since opening shop in April 2011, we’ve had 831,000 pageviews, by some 473,000 users. Around 75% of our site traffic is new visitors which I thought was pretty interesting. 70% of our traffic is from desktop computers, most of the rest is from mobile users who tend to spent significantly less time on the site.
Our “Simple Guides” represent by far the most popular landing pages (arriving at the site). These few pages account for 35% of arrivals at microBEnet… virtually all of which is organic search traffic. Organic search traffic (76% of total traffic on microBEnet) meaning that people type something into Google and get that page, as opposed to navigating there from elsewhere on the site. 97% of those come from Google which says more about Google than microBEnet I think. Interestingly enough, typing “ribosomal RNA” into Google gives one of our Simple Guides as the third hit, behind Wikipedia and Encyclopedia Britannica.
But the real burning question… what are the top 10 blog posts (as measured by pageviews) of the 1500 posts to date? Here they are:
#1 What does the term microbiome mean? And where did it come from? A bit of a surprise ..
#3 Methylisothiazolinone in household items – a growing (or well, killing) problem #germophobia
#4 The long road from Data to Wisdom, and from DNA to Pathogen
#5 Comparing the new 16S rRNA V4 and ITS primers to the old primers-RESULTS!
#6 Very very big microbe news: FDA bans antibacterial soaps w/ triclosan & other chems
#7 11+ things everyone needs to know about microbes
#8 Visualizing millions of DNA sequences – in your web browser!
#9 Interesting Indoor Microbe of the day: Serratia marcescens
#10 What’s Your Kardashian Index?
It looks like there are two primary ways to become a popular blog post… one is to be a long rant by Jonathan about something people care about. The second is a guest post from someone that has information of direct practical relevance (new software, data analysis, etc).
I’ll see if I can remember to touch base on this again when we hit 2000 posts.