Leaving Cert Results Day. Chaos. 57,000 students get their results and a lot of them are online at some stage during the day looking for info and that is of course where i come in 😉
By around 3pm today, theleavingcert.com broke it’s previous traffic record which was set back in June. That previous record was 3,706 visits in a day. As i publish this post, traffic for today stands at 5,356 visits with an hour or so left.
About 60% of that traffic is going straight to our ‘leaving cert points system‘ post. Why? Because we ranked no.1 in google for ‘leaving cert points’ for most of the day.
Up until now though, and i can’t stress this enough, we’ve just sort of got lucky with SEO. I didn’t write that post to get traffic or get to no.1 for ‘leaving cert points’. The content & site in general is just well SEO’d by default.
I don’t think our SEO is flawless or can’t be improved – there’s loads of room for improvement and actually quite a lot of things wrong with the site from an SEO point of view. However, if i can pick holes in our own site, you can only guess what i can do to sites who rank lower than us 
Starting next month though, the site is getting a major revamp, merging with another and for the first time ever, being properly looked after. Rather than fluke traffic, we’ll be looking at all of our stats and producing content which we feel people want.
As things stand, traffic has grown about 350% this year and that’s before the merger with leaving-cert.net & this major revamp which will happen next month…
So if we continue to add content & keep doing what we’re doing, you’d assume traffic will just keep growing and growing exponentially in to the foreseeable future. We’ve plenty of new features coming but we also have plenty of ideas and plans for the future which is big motivator.
I’m more excited today about the leaving cert than i was 4 years ago when i got my own leaving cert results, but for different reasons.
To infinity & beyond…
Just visited it … thought google had banned you …. did they readmit you into adsense?
No, i’m still banned but the site isn’t. It’s co-owned now so not everything needs to be in my name 🙂 On a sidenote, i must send off my annual appeal letter to google – it’s been over 3 years now and they still refuse to even reply.
Funny, they actually sent a message titled “You’re missing out on extra AdSense earnings” to our leaving cert account…. encouraging us to put more ads on leaving-cert.net…
The reason why i don’t talk about adsense these days is because i can’t trust them anymore. They can just ban you overnight & that’s that… no comeback & no reason which is the most frustrating part..