CLUAS, Google and Dublin's gig venues

Did you ever do a Google search and see that, just below the number one result, there is a set of supplementary search results? These are what Google calls "site links", basically about 8 or so extra links that can take you to some specific pages on the no. 1 ranked site for your search. Google does this for a small proportion of sites, those it considers more important and CLUAS, for many years now, has been one of them (hooray!).

Every few months Google updates the links that it places as "site links" and I recently noticed that if you run a search now on Google for 'CLUAS', 5 of the 8 "site links" for CLUAS point directly to pages we have that list our gig reviews by venue. These pages actually have been a big success, even before Google decided to highlight them among the "site links". They bring a lot of traffic to the site via all the search engines (and not just google) and a lot of this traffic are first time visitors to the site.

In total we have pages for 8 venues and last year these pages alone were visited a total of 16,787 times, about 50% of these visits were referred to us by - indeed - the Google search engine. In the table below I dig out (thanks to the Google Analytics service):

• the number of visitors who were referred to these pages by search engines,
• the average numbers of pages each of these visitors went on to read on CLUAS during their visit, and
• what percentage of these visitors were hitting CLUAS for the first time.

As you can see the pages have been a fruitful source of new visitors, some of whom may go on to be regulars, increasing the overall CLUAS visitor base:

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