Chris Anderson of Wired and The Long Tail has another interesting find -- over a quarter of the traffic at his site is from users being directed by Google into his archives.
What matters to modern search engines is relevance, measure mostly by the number of other sites that link to a page. A little-noticed implication of this is that older content tends to score higher because it's had longer to accumulate incoming links. In other words, search inverts the usual priority of content: older is often better.
We don't think of Google as a time machine, but that's actually what it is. By subsuming time under more important criteria such as "authority", it frees us from the tyranny of the new. Quality lasts and freshness is just one factor in many that determine value.
He goes on to note that search engines account for 37% of his total traffic, with 10% going to new material and 27% to the archives. By contrast, the traffic to his archives that originates elsewhere (e.g. his own archive navigation links) accounts for only 12% of his total -- search engines more than triple the readership of his old material, which now makes up 39% of his overall traffic. A commenter at Anderson's thread notes a similar phenomenon at his own site -- any given item gets about 20% of its lifetime traffic while new and 80% while archived, 35% of that from searches and 45% from outside links or archive browsing.
Makes me wonder if the ephemeral content model that so many traditional media outlets like (and that I reluctantly use for my podcast) is really such a hot idea. It may be painful to have exponentially more resources tied up in archival content, but "new" doesn't quite mean what it used to anymore.
Posted by Aaron S. Veenstra ::: 2006:05:01:22:36
As an avid Google user, I can attest to this from the other end. It's sometimes frustrating for me when I'm trying to find current information to have the old come up first, but it's easy to winnow through things, and there have been many times I've found something I needed going through the back door of old files. Time is not always relevant