I decided to scan the top 25K websites on the internet The purpose was to see who all were still implementing the meta keyword tag. As I started crawling these websites the experiment became bigger and bigger. Below I present some of my findings.
I used the top 25K list from Quantcast. Approximately 1120 sites had a hidden profile so I could scan only 23880 websites.
1) Response times
Approximately 1352 websites failed either a DNS lookup or the connection timed out (slower than 20 seconds).
Here is a table for the response times of these sites.
| RESPONSE TIME (SECONDS) | URL ( TOTAL) | % OF TOTAL. |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | 9170 | 38.4 |
| 2 | 7380 | 30.9 |
| 3 | 3393 | 14.21 |
| 4 | 1218 | 5.1 |
| 5 | 818 | 3.43 |
| 6 | 196 | 0.82 |
| 7 | 65 | 0.27 |
| 8 | 44 | 0.18 |
| 9 | 187 | 0.78 |
| 10 | 31 | 0.13 |
Approx 92% of the sites opened up in the first 5 seconds.
- less than 1000 websites were above 5 seconds.
Response codes
- 5.6% (1352 took longer than expected or had no response.
- 63.85% had 200 status ok. (2xx)
- 28.57% used a redirect. ( 3xx )
- 1.68% (402) websites had a not found error (4xx)
- 0.23% had a server error (5xx)
Bonus Analysis on analytics software.
I also crawled their web page to find out how many were using Google tag manager. I also checked for others such as
- Google Tag Manager
- Google Analytics
- Doubleclick
- Marketo
- Adobe Analytics
This is a relative percentage markup as not each site was tracked or followed. Approx 13K sites provided some sort of a js code to detect what system they were using.
The following is the table breakdown.
| ANALYTICS SOFTWARE | TOTAL | % RELATIVE |
|---|---|---|
| Contains: googletagmanager | 1243 | 8.17% |
| Contains: google-analytics | 8553 | 56.19% |
| Contains: doubleclick | 3218 | 21.14% |
| Contains: marketo | 126 | 0.83% |
| Contains: adobe | 986 | 6.48% |