Tag Archives: traffic

2013 blogging stats: You still hate Lotus Notes, and I guess I should still miss Google Reader

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At the end of every year, WordPress.com automatically generates a nifty presentation about this blog’s readership statistics. To view it, click the fireworks graphics below; for some of my own takes on these numbers and others not included in that infographic, scroll past it.

To start, I had slightly fewer readers than in 2012, at 84,411 versus 89,639. That’s mainly because I didn’t have any one post blow up from a link at a widely-read blog. Instead, the most-read post was my 2011 rewrite of a cheat sheet I wrote on the Post intranet about forwarding Lotus Notes e-mail to Gmail–followed by two other how-to posts, one on my cure for a runaway OS X “CalendarAgent” process and another about places where T-Mobile can provide 3G service for older iPhones.

(I’m going to ping T-Mo PR for an update on that data; if people are relying on me for help, I might as well deliver something current.)

As for what sites sent traffic here, “Search Engines”–by which I mean “Google and then trace elements of Bing and Yahoo”–led the list. WordPress.com set them aside to highlight human-curated sites: first Twitter, then Facebook, then USA Today.

The dearly-departed Google Reader also got a shout-out in my blog host’s presentation. Its sort-of replacement Google+ did not; by WordPress.com’s count, Google’s social network sent less traffic than a single reader comment at the Post’s site. Will my activating the new option to have posts automatically shared on G+ change that? Look for an answer in the 2014 version of this post, coming in about 365 days.

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Why are random spammy sites pointing to here?

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Spammy referrersI never mind people reading this blog, but lately I’ve been getting a little antsy over some of the sites that seem to be sending people here. Over the past few days, a motley assortment of spammy-looking pages have been showing up as referers in my stats.

As you can see in the screen grab I took Tuesday morning, most seem to reside at domain names that suggest some sort of substance. But when I’ve clicked through I’ve found nothing but a list of search links, in some cases categorized and in other cases pretty much random. And the searches that I can see in some of those referring links–today, for example, “star hotel roma” and “blog for make money online”–have little to nothing to do with what I write about here.

Spam happens because people think that it will help them make money online. But just what kind of business model am I looking at here? The only way I can see the spammers profiting from sending people to my site is if they’ve got a business connection to a WordAds advertiser, but the ads I see have almost always been from name-brand companies–this program is deliberately limited to “high-quality,” national advertisers. So what’s the deal? If you have a theory, I’d like to read about it in the comments.