Given the rash of airplane crashes in recent weeks, I was interested to see how some of our focused aviation accident sites were affected. The chart to the left comes from a client who has a focused plane accident site. As you can see the bump in traffic corresponds with the successful water landing of a US Airways flight in NYC, followed by another large spike after the tragic accident in Buffalo.
These types of current event inspired spikes are typically more pronounced with specialty sites. This is because the narrowly focused content usually contains a much larger universe of event related keywords. I saw a similar spike when Andrew Thomas announced a major prostitution sting operation in August. For that month, Howard Snader saw traffic to his sex crimes website jump over 250%.
Active BLOGs are particuraly useful in responding to current events since they are updated regularly and can react to the incident with real time information, which the search engines appreciate.