When it comes to organic Internet traffic, Pinterest is moving up in the cyber world. Last week, Pinterest replaced Yahoo as the fourth biggest source of online traffic. Organic traffic is Web traffic that comes from unpaid listing at search engines or directories.
The news came via a blog post from Shareaholic, which noted that Pinterest sent more traffic than Yahoo in the month of August, and as such became the fourth largest traffic source in the world for the month.
“While it is still far behind both Google organic, direct and Facebook (News - Alert) referral traffic with an undetermined business model, Pinterest continues to send more traffic each month to our network of publishers,” the blog post explained, adding that “Since May, Pinterest traffic has more than doubled in size.” That last fact seems even more surprising when coupled with the news that, since January, traffic for the three of the other dominant traffic sources online – Google (News - Alert), Bing and Yahoo – had dropped on average by 15.63 percent.
Shareaholic’s reporting shows that, while Pinterest’s percentage of traffic source rose from 1.38 to 1.84 between July and August, almost every other referral source listed – with the exception of direct traffic – fell for the same period, with Google losing more than 3 percent of its share during that period (going from 44.76 percent in July to 41.28 percent). Other losses were considerably lesser – Yahoo, for example, only dropped from 1.47 percent to 1.37 percent, and Facebook from 6.06 percent to 5.9 percent.
The social network was already driving more referral traffic than Google Plus, LinkedIn and YouTube combined by January of this year. By July, Pinterest was also sending more referral traffic than Twitter (News - Alert) and Stumbleupon, and was pulling slightly ahead of the Bing search engine.
As the Internet continues to gain momentum and websites continue to grow, the Internet protocol standard is switching from IPv4 to IPv6. IPv4 has a 32-bit address space, meaning the number of total IP addresses is limited to approximately 4.3 billion, a space that has reached its limit with over a billion Internet users and billions of Internet-connected devices. With the new IPv6, there are a massively larger number of addresses available by using 128-bit addressing. Although your company’s site may not generate traffic as big as Pinterest, there is still a need to manage the traffic load for your servers.
A load balancer provides scalability to IT infrastructure by allowing users to add new servers with the same URL. If a server is offline or is overwhelmed with traffic requests, the load balancer can intelligently route users to another server to provide a seamless user experience. Server load balancing offers server health checks and monitoring, routes to best-available server, persistence for continued connection and 25 percent efficiency boost of server resources.
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Edited by Rich Steeves