WordPress.com

1. jongleason
   Member
   Dec 7, 2011, 3:26 PM

   Sometime in the last month, "Search Engines" started showing up as a group under "Referrers" in my Site Stats, which I like. Previously, as far as I know, the only way I could tell how many search engine referrals was by the Search Engine Terms. Kudos for that.

   My questions:
   1. Is there any way to tell which Search Engine Term was used on which Search Engine?
   2. The number of "Search Engines" referrals doesn't match the number of Search Engine terms. I saw something in Support or the forum somewhere (forget where) that said search engines don't always report the search term, but that this would be reported as an unknown search term. I'm not getting any report of "unknown search terms". Just curious as to what is going on.

   The blog I need help with is mindrenewers.com.

2. timethief
   Member
   Dec 7, 2011, 5:53 PM

   This is the link to the support documentation on WordPress.com stats and search engine terms is found there.

3. jongleason
   Member
   Dec 7, 2011, 6:03 PM

   Thank you, timethief. I did look at that page, and that is where I saw the reference to "unknown search term". But I'm not having any report of unknown search terms, and the number of search terms don't match the number of referrals from search engines.

   So either I'm not the brightest (more than theoretically possible :)), or stats don't really report unknown search terms after all, or there is some other explanation that isn't on that page.

4. auxclass
   Member
   Dec 7, 2011, 7:45 PM

   Stats are sort of an estimate - you have a LOT more visitors than the stats show - they are search bots just crawling your site and spammers spamming - the thing to look at is the average over a long time or the trend - watching the ups and down daily can drive you batty - not always do the links and sites come in so they are easy to capture and count -

5. ismailimail
   Member
   Dec 7, 2011, 7:54 PM

   Also note this comment, WordPress has been historically undercounting the stats. As far as is known, there has been no update on this specific point.

6. jongleason
   Member
   Dec 8, 2011, 7:35 AM

   Thanks, all. It's really not that important, the main thing is providing good content to my regular readers, but I find the search engine referrals interesting.

   As to historically undercounting, I'm pretty sure that is correct, because my stats readership is pretty low (my content is narrowly focused, and I'm relatively new at blogging), but I hear directly from more people than I would expect about things they have read. Maybe most of my readers contact me, but that would be unusual, so I suspect I'm having undercounts.

   Does anyone have "unknown search terms" show up in their stats count?

7. teamoyeniyi
   Member
   Dec 8, 2011, 11:06 AM

   My search engine terms do pretty much match the Search engine referral numbers - sometimes 1 out, but that is all.

   If I want to know what came from where, I look in the Webmaster Tools (Google and Bing)

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