Three month after domain name change
Three month ago, on May 1, 2013, in an attempt to clarify what the site is about, I moved all the content of perl5maven.com to perlmaven.com.
Back then I collected some numbers from Alexa so I can see how does the change effect the position of my web site. I even compared a bunch of Perl, Python, Ruby and PHP sites with their respective Alexa ranking.
As Alexa uses a 3-month average, I wanted to see what's the status now, and let you know what I see in the Google Analytics reports of the Perl Maven site.
Google Analytics - the private data
Looking at the numbers provided by Google Analytics, within a few days I noticed the number of visitors falling.
By the beginning of June 2013, the daily visitor count went down from some 2,200 to around 1,200. That despite several people translating and publishing individual pages in 13 different languages.
Looking at the data from the analytics and from Google webmaster I saw the biggest issue was that in many search result on Google, the site was moved from position 1-2, to position 2-3 or even lower. Just this had the effect of reducing the click-through rate and thus the number of visitors by about 40%.
It was not an easy feeling, but I hoped in time Google will notice that this is the same site, with the same content and will increase its trust.
I did not wait though. Besides the many-many articles that were translated and published by the awesome volunteers, I also published a number of articles and tried to make sure Google (and Yandex) know which pages are the translated versions of which pages.
I am not sure what exactly worked, but starting on July 10, 2013, I started to see an increase in visitors and by July 16, it was already more than 2,600 / day. It slightly lowered since then but I constantly get between 2,200-2,500 visitors / workday.
Let's see the graph for weekly visitor count of perlmaven.com for the past year:
You can see the deep hole staring on May 1.
Hopefully this new growth trend will continue.
The monthly visitor count shows the same data in a smoother way:
Data from Alexa
Now let's look at the data from Alexa.
Perl Maven
As you can see the perlmaven.com site is still very far from reaching the same position where the perl5maven.com was 3 month ago. I did not think that my articles will loose their position because if the move. I think I have not published anything on the Perl 6 Maven site, so it is not surprising its position is so bad.
| 5 Aug 2012 | 5 Mar 2013 | 30 Apr 2013 | August 1, 2013 | |
| perlmaven.com | na | 19,000,000 | 5,337,012 | 463,774 |
| perl5maven.com | 2,637,818 | 487,529 | 362,104 | 4,809,622 |
| perl6maven.com | 2,476,882 | 5,360,813 | 4,216,918 | 25,589,487 |
Perl
perltutorial.org was folded into www.zentut.com that has all kinds of tutorials.
| 5 Aug 2012 | 5 Mar 2013 | 30 Apr 2013 | 1 Aug 2013 | |
| cpan.org | 8,874 | 12,220 | 13,059 | 16,038 |
| perl.org | 13,555 | 19,792 | 20,148 | 22,878 |
| perlmonks.org | 19,100 | 23,061 | 22,657 | 26,493 |
| metacpan.org | 204,350 | 124,979 | 129,363 | 149,770 |
| perlmeme.org | na | 263,032 | 268,409 | 276,654 |
| perl.com | 167,090 | 196,762 | 187,114 | 283,021 |
| pm.org | 309,987 | 366,302 | 367,905 | 412,588 |
| www.misc-perl-info.com | na | na | na | 416,832 |
| www.perlfect.com | na | 298,641 | 348,442 | 463,507 |
| perlmaven.com | 2,637,818 | 487,529 | 362,104 | 463,774 |
| cpantesters.org | 586,727 | 386,124 | 424,316 | 571,325 |
| strawberryperl.com | 359,827 | 509,310 | 478,935 | 579,924 |
| template-toolkit.org | 359,903 | 478,507 | 415,943 | 605,291 |
| modernperlbooks.com | 495,533 | 533,520 | 599,331 | 834,295 |
| dbperl.com | 890,748 | 774,351 | 927,242 | 873,462 |
| perl-community.de | 363,020 | 592,875 | 821,008 | 878,838 |
| perlide.org | 1,144,312 | 855,267 | 780,515 | 1,113,937 |
| perl-begin.org | 1,372,709 | 1,143,249 | 1,354,824 | 1,479,426 |
| pragmaticperl.com | na | 2,565,785 | 1,386,332 | 1,663,816 |
| perl-tutorial.org | na | 1,979,826 | 1,869,652 | 1,833,557 |
| perlnews.org | 5,281,817 | 2,948,156 | 2,211,814 | 1,951,980 |
| perltraining.com.au | 2,015,297 | 1,532,729 | 2,101,143 | 2,355,057 |
| dwimperl.com | 10,734,727 | 2,370,691 | 1,978,880 | 2,785,031 |
| perlbuzz.com | 1,274,377 | 1,240,728 | 1,172,940 | 2,835,423 |
| perlhacks.com | 4,929,876 | 2,225,588 | 2,115,248 | 4,456,055 |
| perl101.org | na | 1,862,320 | 2,017,408 | 4,788,715 |
| perltutorial.org | 1,804,595 | 1,844,660 | 2,833,153 | na |
| learning-perl.com | 13,824,173 | 4,712,749 | 3,784,318 | 6,232,915 |
| effectiveperlprogramming.com | 2,183,984 | 2,501,540 | 4,366,916 | 7,195,634 |
| perlcabal.org | 5,461,751 | 3,204,732 | 2,503,575 | 8,901,646 |
| perl-magazin.de | 6,615,032 | na | 22,487,241 | 22,264,416 |
While there is a downwards trend in these numbers, this is not surprising as more and more people use the Internet for things other than programming. We can observe similar downwards trends in the other 3 major dynamic languages. Even Stack Overflow went from position 78 at the end of April to 102 on Aug 1, 2013.
PHP
| 5 Aug 2012 | 5 Mar 2013 | 30 Apr 2013 | 1 Aug 2013 | |
| php.net | 251 | 330 | 347 | 460 |
| drupal.org | 491 | 664 | 683 | 1,344 |
Python
| 5 Aug 2012 | 5 Mar 2013 | 30 Apr 2013 | 1 Aug 2013 | |
| python.org | 4,426 | 4,344 | 4,696 | 6,203 |
| djangoproject.com | 18,171 | 13,571 | 16,126 | 14,187 |
| learnpythonthehardway.org | 70,078 | 80,942 | 61,412 | 62,605 |
Ruby
| 5 Aug 2012 | 5 Mar 2013 | 30 Apr 2013 | 1 Aug 2013 | |
| rubyonrails.org | 11,006 | 12,339 | 13,020 | 15,224 |
| railscasts.com | na | na | 14,424 | 17,505 |
| ruby-lang.org | 24,816 | 30,553 | 31,229 | 40,349 |
| rubyinside.com | 78,906 | 122,712 | 131,011 | 142,138 |