Category Cleaning Results
It’s been a couple of weeks now since I wrote my last post on category cleaning. I thought I’d post the results of that activity here.
One of the keys to improving anything on the web is to track your visitors with a good analytics system. I use Google Analytics on this blog, so I ran some reports to see if my changes have had the effect that I wanted.
I compared 2 time periods: Sep. 4 - 13 with Oct. 2-11. Both time periods are Tuesday through Thursday intervals because I wanted to minimize time-of-week variances. Oct. 2 is the first whole day that had the categories changed.
General Site Statistics:
Overall, it appears that my blog is performing better, with higher Pages/Visit, a slightly lower Bounce Rate, and a higher Avg. Time on Site.
I wanted to see how the change affected my categories specifically. Here is a report for my “Web Services” category. It seems to align pretty well with a few of my other categories.
From examining my ‘Navigation Summary’ report for that category page, it appears that people are now clicking from posts within this category and then to other related posts.
Another side-effect from changing my categories is that Google is hitting a bunch of pages not found. Check out this list from my Webmaster Tools report:
The list is pretty long, but I don’t think it should affect my search rankings too drastically. There should just be a period of time before Google removes these pages from the index. If I had the time, I could configure redirects from all of the missing categories to related categories, but I don’t have the time for that.
Filed Under: Improving Your Blog
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