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Peculiar popularity
 
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gristgal



Joined: 05 Jan 2006
Posts: 209
Location: Mississippi

PostPosted: Sun Jun 17, 2007 1:03 am    Post subject: Peculiar popularity Reply with quote

Hi John,

Something strange is going on with my blog, and I'm hoping you will have some idea what it is. I have suspicions, but insufficient knowledge of much of the mechanics of how the internet really works to assess their likelihood.

For more than two weeks, two old posts of mine (one about democracy in Iraq, the other about chocolate) have been retrieved more times than any recent ones.

What seems peculiar is that there are no clues to the sources of the links in my Referer lists. I even Googled for gristandgristle + the topics, and found no indications that they've been linked on someone else's blog or website. I realize there are some legitimate ways this could be done, but I doubt I've come up with all of them, or even necessarily the most likely.

Can you enlighten me?
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john
Site Admin


Joined: 16 Mar 2004
Posts: 3434

PostPosted: Sun Jun 17, 2007 10:08 am    Post subject: Re: Peculiar popularity Reply with quote

Just looking at your Browser Stats and I see that 4 of the top 5 and 12 of the top 17 browsers visiting your site were search engines, so my best guess here is that accesses to the pages in question are coming from search engine robots (crawlers).

We see that on many lesser-trafficked sites, the search engine robots can account for a significant percentage of the overall traffic. Just looking at the top 20 browsers listed in your Browser Stats shows that about 74% of the accesses are from the search engine robots and not from humans, so that's probably the answer.

Another reason a post might seem to have popularity is spammers. They will try to access a page and see if they can post a spam comment. A quick look at your log file shows that all 14 accesses to your chocolate post were from spammers trying to post a comment to it...

As we have discussed before, a third party stats service like Sitemeter can not see the spammers or the search robots. So if you want to get an idea of the actual number of humans seeing your site, you might try implementing their stats.
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gristgal



Joined: 05 Jan 2006
Posts: 209
Location: Mississippi

PostPosted: Sun Jun 17, 2007 11:58 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Thanks. I was afraid of that. You make me doubly glad that you have such excellent defenses against spammers in place. I know that we clients can get pretty grouchy about it when a flurry of spam trackbacks get through your defenses, but we who have a bit of experience realize that you intercept the overwhelming majority (remember my fantasy caravan story snippet?) Wink

I know I should set up outside stats, but it's so hard to find the energy to do that, or even to implement other changes I've contemplated for a year (or more, in some cases). I know I don't talk about my chronic health problems nearly as much as most other bloggers with them, but they are, sadly, a bigger feature in my life than I care to discuss. I don't find any utility in pity parties, which is what that sort of thing inevitably gets around to.

So, I'll just say "Thanks!" once again for the great work you do.

gristgal
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