Google contributes to record traffic on IngentaConnect
Back in early 2004 Ingenta started to work with Google in order to optimise the way that the leading search engine indexed the content we host. We were very quickly able to achieve our two mutual goals: a way for the Google crawler (the program that reads and indexes every page of a website, sometimes referred to as the "Googlebot") to effectively navigate all of the freely available pages on the site, and, for those publishers who agreed, a means by which the crawler could access and index the full text held behind access control. The former was optimised by March 2004, and by May we were opening up full text to the crawler, thus vastly increasing the chances of Google searchers finding content on IngentaConnect.This work has certainly paid off. Since the spring of last year user sessions on Ingenta.com and then IngentaConnect have risen at a rate of almost one million per month, reaching just under 12.5 million in January 2005. Of course, there are other factors contributing to the rise in traffic, not the least being the launch of IngentaConnect with its cleaner interface and faster performance, but we also know that around 30-35% of all traffic on IngentaConnect now comes to us as a direct result of a Google search.
In addition to Google traffic we also track users who come to us from other search engines. Our content is a significant source for Google Scholar which, since its launch, has consistently been the second highest referrer of traffic to IngentaConnect, generating a little less than 5% of traffic. Other search engines that follow closely behind are, in descending order, AOL, Netscape, Yahoo! and MSN. Moving into the top 10 referring sites for IngentaConnect recently have been two lesser-known search engines mywebsearch and Dogpile, both of which combine search results from other engines such as Google and Yahoo!
Finally, despite the obvious benefits of working closely with Google and other search engines, it is important for content providers such as Ingenta to be aware that librarians are not necessarily as enamoured of this method of resource discovery as their users. To that end, we continue to invest in relationships with other linking partners, to ensure that your content is visible via both widely-used and niche scholarly resources. SwetsWise, EBSCOHost EJS and PubMed consistently feature in our top ten referrer sites, and we are extending our linking agreements to include more A&I databases, collection management suppliers, federated search providers, subscription agents and other appropriate organisations all the time.