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Traffic to classified advertising site Craigslist has steadily increased over the past year. Hitwise has an interesting analysis about the sites growth.

U.S. visits to Craigslist were up 93 percent year over year last week and in the Hitwise Classifieds category Craiglist properties, grew 137 percent. The site ranked #23 last week based on share of U.S. Internet visits, up two spots from a month ago and six spots from three months ago.

Craigslist Traffic Graph
(Photo Credit: Hitwise )

Hitwise attributes the growth partly to increased awareness of Craigslist. Heather Hopkins writes," The search term 'craigslist' was the fourth highest volume search term last week, based on share of US Internet searches, beat out only by 'myspace', 'ebay' and 'myspace.com'. The search term accounted for one in every 357 queries last week. Searches for 'craigslist' overtook searches for 'youtube' in September and for 'mapquest' in July."

Hopkins says that Craigslist popularity is increasing beyond California were the site was launched and is spreading into newer states. She writes," Last year, the second largest state, in share of US visits to Craigslist.org was Washington accounting for 5% of visits, followed by Oregon and New York."

"This year, the second largest state was Texas, followed by Florida and New York. US Visits to Craigslist.org from Texas were up 31% and from Florida up 67%. This indicates that growth is being fueled by increasing popularity of Craigslist in newer cities."