Monday, January 2, 2012

Top 25 Posts in 2011 on Genea-Musings

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Like many other genea-bloggers, I'm curious about which posts on Genea-Musings are "popular" - and why they might be.

Here are the Top 25 blog posts that had the most page views in 2011 (from statistics on Google Analytics). Of course, with almost six years and over 5,400 posts, they were not all written in 2011:

1) World records for number of children (posted 21 July 2006) - 7,007 views (it was #1 in 2010, 2009 and 2008 also)

2)  Family Tree Maker 2012 is in a Public Beta Test (posted 1 August 2011) - 4,429 views

3)  Family Tree Maker 2012 News (posted 13 May 2011) - 3,459 views

4) John Tyler's Grandson is still alive! (posted 20 February 2007) - 1,970 views (it was #3 last year)

5) How rare is your personality type? (posted 20 June 2007) - 1,694 views (it was #4 last year)

6)  Social Security Death Index Gone from Rootsweb.com (posted 12 December 2011) - 1,585

7)  Exporting a Tree from Ancestry.com (posted 9 July 2009) - 1,565 views  (it was #12 last year)

8)  Merry Christmas to All! (posted 25 December 2011) - 1,319 views

9)  The Genealogy Crystal Ball for 2011 (posted 2 January 2011) - 1,193 views

10)  Want a genealogy job? FamilyLink is hiring! (posted 15 April 2009) - 1,019  views  (it was #6 last year)

11)  Tombstone Tuesday - Nathaniel Grigsby (posted 19 May 2009 ) - 773 views  (it was #5 last year)

12)  The "Where I'm From" Poem (for SNGF) Compendium (posted 25 July 2011) - 742 views

13)  Genealogy Source Citation Templates (posted 17 November 2008) - 723 views

14)  Family Tree Maker 2012 Pre-Sale (posted 22 September 2011) - 721 views

15)  The Seaver Source Citation Saga Compendium (posted 16 February 2011) - 710 views

16) Family Tree Maker 2011 Announced (posted on 6 August 2010) - 709 views

17)  "Geni Pro Just got a Whole Lot Better." But what about Geni Free? (posted 1 August 2011) - 701 views

18)  Tuesday's Tip - find Online Historical Newspapers (posted 4 January 2011) - 698 views

19)  Family Tree Wallpaper (posted 17 September 2008) - 695 views

20)  Was Daniel Boone an Ancestor of Pat Boone? (posted 31 August 2007) - 687  views  (it was #13 last year)

21)  My mtDNA is in the K Haplogroup (posted 30 September 2008) - 680  views  (it was #14 last year)

22)  Using Google Earth to find land location in the Public Land Survey System States (posted 14 September 2009) - 668 views

23)  First Look at Mocavo - A New Genealogy Search Engine (posted 16 March 2011) - 649 views

24)  More Genealogy-related songs (posted 9 November 2007) - 641 views

25)  Obtaining my dad's WWII service record (posted 4 August 2006) - 632 views

Fourteen of these top 25 posts are "oldies but goodies" - posts that people find by using a search engine, and the traffic is fairly steady for them. The others are more recent posts, and the traffic for most of them peaks right after they are posted and dies down quickly. 

Of course, all of my blog posts are viewed by many more readers - those who read on the Genea-Musings home page, those that read them in an RSS reader, on a mobile device, and those that receive them via email.

Another measure of popularity or readership might be in the number of comments generated by each post.  I don't think that is a reliable measure of popularity because of the proliferation of RSS reader usage, email usage, and mobile device usage, each of which require one or more click throughs to get to the comment box.

It certainly seems like readers search for pop culture topics or for genealogy software topics and find my blog posts.

Previous "most popular" posts on Genea-Musings are:

*  2010:  Genea-Musings Top 20 Hits for 2010
* 2009: Genea-Musings Statistics for 2009 - Post 2
* 2008: Genea-Musings top posts - by page views

1 comment:

Martin said...

Yes, but what were your most popular postings of just 2012?