Still – I had a play with Alexa and Google and the stats were interesting to see. WordPress.com has practically exploded. If Alexa’s 2% reach is correct then that makes WordPress.com and all its blogs into one of the most potent internet nodes.

Looking for traffic to WordPress.org and its rivals (I’ve put in Joomla, Plone and Drupal) is also illuminating. I recommend a good play around with the charts. Also look at different regions if you’re working with Google.

Google’s CMS traffic

Alexa’s CMS traffic

I find these stats sites great fun. You can also see the effects of certain events. For example, searches for the word Botfly shot up and into existance last year – and these correlated with spikes in traffic to my story of my own experience of the little blighters. The reason was a TV show.

You can also get a taste for the desires of certain countries… French Kissing, it seems, generates huge interest in Pakistan. They also like English Girls.

Why? Because for a year, the page came at the top of the second page of Google searches for the term ‘botfly’ and then suddenly it got promoted to second from bottom of the first page. Look at the difference in clicks for that search term from Google:

The difference is worth about a 30% increase in traffic, in this case.