Nelso.com crawl stats. How fast is fast enough?

Below we've included a screenshot of the crawl stats for Nelso.com, taken from the webmaster interface at Google. As you can see, the page load times for Nelso.com have improved steadily over the last 90 days, and now average a little under 700 milliseconds.

It's also obvious from the graphs that page load time has a direct effect on how many pages the GoogleBot crawls per day (and thus how many pages from Nelso.com end up in the Google index). That leads to a question, and maybe a reader can comment on this post with the answer. Is 684 milliseconds a good page load time, or just average? What do other large sites see in their GoogleBot crawl stats? Will the relationship between GoogleBot crawl speed and page load time hold true if we decrease page load time another 50% (i.e. will the GoogleBot double the number of pages it crawls per day on Nelso.com)?

OK, maybe that's three questions. But you get the idea.

Back from New York

I've just returned from New York, where Nelso has started its coverage of Manhattan. We are still processing photos from the trip, but we already have a good guide to bars and restaurants in SoHo up on the site.

There is no such thing as bad publicity

Just came across an article from early March about Yelp in the NY Times: "The Review Site Yelp Draws Some Outcries of Its Own". The article is not completely negative, but it does quote a number of business owners and Yelp reviewers that feel they have been wronged by Yelp.

This is not the first article of this type that I've come across. It seems every six months I read some article about Yelp and the controversy surrounding its five million business reviews (e.g. "Online review policy has local business owners Yelping mad").

But there's no such thing as bad publicity, especially for a content web site that is free for users. Yelp's traffic has more than doubled over the last year. I'd be quite happy to have a long article in the New York Times gently chiding Nelso while touting its rapid growth and high-quality business listings.

Local search growing faster than overall web search

According to a recent study by comScore of internet usage patterns, local search grew much more quickly last year than the overall search market, with searches for local businesses and services growing 58% in 2008, compared to growth of 21% for overall search traffic.

The following quote from the report is encouraging for sites like Nelso:

75 percent of the top 100 keywords searched on Internet Yellow Pages sites were non-branded, indicating that a majority of consumers have not decided on a specific company or product brand when they begin their search.

What this means is that most users are not searching for a specific business or brand (e.g. Louis Vuitton), but for a general category like "luggage". This is a big positive for sites like Nelso that can offer good category listings, but have difficulty competing for traffic from searches for brand names.

The value of listings in multiple languages

Nelso concentrates on two "niches" in the local search market: high quality data collected by our own staff, and offering listings in many languages.

We recently ran the stats for who is looking at our business listings, and in what language they are using Nelso.

Traffic to Czech business listings by language of user

In one of our most popular markets, the Czech Republic, less than 50% of page views are from locals (i.e. in Czech). Almost a quarter of page views are in English, and the remaining 30% are made up of many languages, including Danish, German, and Russian. Thus, our listings in the Czech Republic would be worth less than half as much if we didn't support so many languages.

We suspected that the Czech Republic might be an exceptional case. Prague is a very popular tourist destination, and so one would expect that many users looking for businesses would not be locals.

Traffic to Danish business listings by language of user

But our stats for our Danish business listings suggest otherwise. Denmark does get its share of tourists, but we expected almost all our local search traffic to be from Danes (i.e. in Danish). However, Danish-language traffic to our Danish business listings makes up only slightly more than half of all traffic, with English, Czech, and German making up more than 25% of all traffic to DK business listings.

We're headed to New York in May, 2009 to start photographing businesses in Manhattan for the Nelso sites. Is it possible that more than 50% of the traffic to these new listings will be in languages other then English?

Is China a bigger internet market than the U.S.?

Earlier today, we accomplished a long-term goal with the launch of Nelso in Chinese at Nelso.cn. According to numerous articles published in the last year, China's internet population is nearly equal to that of the U.S., or already larger. No matter when the cross-over point occurs, it is clear that both India and China will far surpass the the U.S. in internet users over the next decade. Thus, we're excited to have launched beta versions of Nelso in Chinese for China, and in Hindi for India (many people in India also use the internet in English, of course).

प्राहा, चेक गणराज्य

We're working on a Hindi version of Nelso. With approximately 600 million speakers of the language, there must be people using Hindi to search Google for information about Prague or Copenhagen.

Nelso partners with Volny.cz on local search

Nelso has partnered with one of the Czech Republic's largest portals, Volny.cz, to provide local search listings for restaurants and bars in Prague to its one million monthly visitors. Currently, the partnership is limited to a tab on their home page search box, which takes users to a Volny-branded version of Nelso.

This is Nelso's first partnership deal, and we'll be closely monitoring the quantity (and quality) of traffic we get from Volny. We'll update this blog in a few months with the results of this "experiment".

Nelso now supports OpenID on all its sites

Nelso has implemented OpenID as an alternative to logging in using a Nelso account.

What this means in practice is that you can now log in to Nelso to add a business with your Google Gmail account, your Yahoo! account, or any other OpenID-enabled account you may have on the web. In the Czech Republic, Seznam has enabled OpenID on all its accounts, so if you have a Seznam account, you can log in to Nelso with that username and password and you'll never need to remember a different password for Nelso.

To make OpenID even easier to use, we've added clickable links to log in using accounts on major portals, so you don't have to remember the endpoint URL for your OpenID provider (didn't understand that? That's exactly why we've added these clickable links).

Check out the new Nelso login page to see how logging in to Nelso is now much easier than it was before.

Top categories on Nelso.cz for December 2008

The top categories for user searches on Nelso.cz for the month of December 2008 were:

1. Plavecké bazény (swimming pools)
   This was a popular search during the summer, but not sure why it'd be so popular in December. Perhaps people are already sick of winter and want to go swimming rather than do a winter sport.
2. Pošty (post offices)
   Always a popular search. For some reason, on Seznam.cz we rank above the actual Czech post office when searching for post offices in Prague. The Czech Post might want to do a little SEO, at least to rank for their own name.
3. Kostely (churches)
   This is a new one. I don't think we've ever had so much traffic for this category before. The days in December with the most searches for "church" on Nelso.cz? December 25th and December 31st, of course.
4. Zubní lékaři (dentists)
   No surprises here. Everyone has to go to the dentist.
5. Mexické restaurace (Mexican restaurants)
   I don't normally think of Czechs as big fans of Mexican food, but this may just be the effect of our SEO efforts in this area.
6. Papírnictví (paper and stationery stores)
7. Sushi
8. Indické restaurace (Indian restaurants)
   Wow, the Czechs are getting adventurous. Mexican food, Sushi, and Indian food all in the top 10? What happened to the beloved Czech "knedlíky" (dumplings)?
9. Tetovací Studia & Body Piercing (tattoos and body piercing)
   I'm now used to the idea of tattoos being a top 10 category, but when I started Nelso a year ago I would never have guessed this category would be so popular.
10. Čínské restaurace (Chinese restaurants)
    Again, so surprises here. Prague is full of Chinese restaurants, and the Czechs love Chinese food.

What's interesting about this list is that it is not in line with the popular perception of Nelso as a restaurant and bar guide. The top four categories are all unrelated to food and drink, and only four of the top 10 are related to restaurants (none of the top ten are related to drinking alcohol - you have to go down to our #16 category, hospody (pubs) to find that). Many local sites concentrate too heavily on restaurants and entertainment, when there is a lot of traffic out there for more "mundane" categories like dentists and office supplies.