Centrum.cz sending us twice the traffic of Seznam.cz

Because of the nature of our site, Nelso.cz receives a lot of its traffic from search engines. Most users try a search engine first when looking for local information, so a user goes to Google to search for "hospoda mala strana" and then follows the link to our listings for Hospody (pubs) in Malá Strana. Simple enough.

For the English-language Prague search site, Google sends us almost 100% of our search engine traffic. While it's a little surprising that Yahoo sends us almost no traffic from the U.S., Google is definitely the largest search engine for English speakers and should be sending us the most traffic.

In the Czech Republic, the situation is a not quite what we expected. Out of the three Czech-language search engines that send us traffic, the largest in terms of total market share (Seznam) actually sends the least amount of traffic to our site. In the Czech Republic, search engine referrals come largely from Google.cz (75.6%), then Centrum.cz (15.5%), and then Seznam.cz (8.9%). While I've always been convinced that Google.cz is more popular in the Czech Republic than the press has been reporting, I was surprised to see Seznam.cz dead last in referring users to Nelso.cz, and a distant third at that.

There are a number of possible explanations for this: Seznam hasn't indexed Nelso.cz as thoroughly as Google or Centrum, Seznam's ranking algorithm doesn't favor the way Nelso.cz is structured, or perhaps Google is stronger in Prague and therefore appears bigger from the perspective of a Prague-centric site. I'd be interested to see stats from other Czech sites to compare with ours.