Image from: Football Image / Shutterstock

The 2012 NFL draft will be held this Thursday, Friday and Saturday in New York and the Internet is already abuzz with excitement and predictions. In fact, “NFL draft” has been a popular search term, according to Google Trends, for the past few days.  I wanted to see what kind of impact the draft has had on traffic to football sites, so I checked the search referrals to the sites in our Sports>Football category.

You’ll notice that even though this data counts searches since January, mention of this year’s draft appears at number 11 on the list, accounting for .76% of all search referral share.  So which sites are people checking to get their NFL draft fix? I pulled the daily keyword destinations for the phrase “NFL draft” to find out.

You’ll notice that walterfootball.com, a site that specializes in creating mock drafts, appears first on the list, followed by sports blogging site bleacherreport.com.  We saw bleacherreport.com’s traffic spike last April around the NFL draft, so it will be interesting to look back at the site’s traffic at the end of the month to see how the draft has impacted bleacherreport.com this year.

Football fans: which sites do you choose to stay up to date on this year’s draft? Since search referrals for both walterfootball.com and bleacherreport.com show many entries revolving around the sites’ “mock draft” features, do you think that adding a mock draft capability to the NFL site would allow them to capture traffic from the other sites?