What’s been quite fascinating with having the stats reset on Autocade is getting a fresh perspective on what its most popular pages are. When a website has been going for 14 years, and the stats have never been refreshed, it doesn’t give you the most up-to-date picture. You know historically what was most popular, but what about in the last year? Unless you really kept an eye on the rates of change, you wouldn’t know.
Here’s how things looked on the old site before the move (March 17). It’s a corner of the ‘Popular pages’ page:
It’s a pity I didn’t take more screenshots on subsequent days, but I had been watching the models linked from the home page occupy the top slots for the last week. That only seemed logical: both readers and search engine spiders were hitting them more. Here’s how things looked on March 23, with Autocade at its new home after a couple of days:
But here we are today, a week later:
You’re beginning to see the earlier highly trafficked pages reassert themselves.
For a long time, the Nissan Bluebird (910) page led the table, before being overtaken by the Toyota Corolla (E120). Now it seems the Renault Mégane II, Ford Fiesta Mk VII, Ford Taunus 80, and the Peugeot 206+ and 207 are leading the way. I see a few other top pages make their way up: Opel Astra J (which isn’t that old a page), and the Holden Commodore (VE), Chrysler–Simca 1307 range, and Ford Cortina Mk III (which are old pages, from the first years of Autocade).
I assume these pages have been somewhat grandfathered by the search engines. It’s a relief to know that the transition to the new box has been relatively seamless for the search engines not to notice.