← Gone Away
More Statistics!
Not since February (Traffic Statistics) have I given any real information on MadTV traffic statistics, apart from a brief cry of despair in The Great March Slump. Seeing as I really don't feel like writing today and yet the pressure to post is on me, it seems a good opportunity to have a "nothing post" looking at the stats as they are now.
I have discovered that Matrixstats gives a rather nice graph of the hits and sessions for the preceding year and this saves me a lot of work in messing about with spreadsheets. Let's have a look at the hits graph to begin with as it's much the most impressive:
This shows a fairly steady increase, especially if we remember that the Gone Away blog began on October 3rd, 2004. We can see the Great March Slump quite clearly and the recovery thereafter. What I notice and begin to worry about, however, is the plateau we have reached lately. In March I began to use the blog exchanges and have kept them going ever since. They have added to traffic and created a few more regulars but I am greedy and always want more. So I ponder and scheme in an attempt to find the next step forward.
We should remember that the the graph reflects hits only. As such it includes page hits and non page hits, the difference being that a non page hit is one where an image or supporting file is required to complete a page viewing. The number of sessions is a much closer approximation to how many visitors are coming to the site, therefore (a session is a visit as seen by the site and may include several page hits). Here is the sessions graph for the same period:
Notice how much smoother the graph is than the hits one. The Great March Slump is very evident still, accentuated by the huge spike just before it (caused by Mad doing extensive work on the site at the time and by his leaving a comment on the Cameron Moll blog which brought hundreds of requests for an image file stored on his server). And again we can see that a plateau has been reached.
Much of my time is spent in grappling with the problem of how to increase traffic beyond what we have already achieved. One of the things that I have been forced to learn about is Page Rank. Google ranks pages on the net according to a secret formula and it is this that decides where in a list of search results that page will appear. The higher the page rank, the nearer the top of the results the page will come. The ranking is out of ten. Mad is particularly proud that his index page recently went up to 6/10, which is an exceptionally high ranking for an individual site like MadTV. My blog hovers at 4/10, a good ranking for a blog but not good enough for me (I told you I'm greedy).
So how do we improve page rank? That is the question that all the webmasters would like to know the answer to. I have seen long dissertations on how Google works them out but all I can tell you is that it is based on a mathematical formula and that the number of incoming links to the page is important. When you consider that the top sites have thousands of links coming in, you realize that we humble bloggers have our work cut out if we are ever to compete with that sort of thing.
I have concluded that page rank is one of those things I can't do much about. Google likes me quite well for a mere blogger and I can't really complain at that. But it does leave me wondering what else I can do to reach all those people out there who are just dying to read my blog (although they may not know it yet). If anyone has the answer and doesn't mind sharing it, I'd love to hear it.
I have discovered that Matrixstats gives a rather nice graph of the hits and sessions for the preceding year and this saves me a lot of work in messing about with spreadsheets. Let's have a look at the hits graph to begin with as it's much the most impressive:
This shows a fairly steady increase, especially if we remember that the Gone Away blog began on October 3rd, 2004. We can see the Great March Slump quite clearly and the recovery thereafter. What I notice and begin to worry about, however, is the plateau we have reached lately. In March I began to use the blog exchanges and have kept them going ever since. They have added to traffic and created a few more regulars but I am greedy and always want more. So I ponder and scheme in an attempt to find the next step forward.
We should remember that the the graph reflects hits only. As such it includes page hits and non page hits, the difference being that a non page hit is one where an image or supporting file is required to complete a page viewing. The number of sessions is a much closer approximation to how many visitors are coming to the site, therefore (a session is a visit as seen by the site and may include several page hits). Here is the sessions graph for the same period:
Notice how much smoother the graph is than the hits one. The Great March Slump is very evident still, accentuated by the huge spike just before it (caused by Mad doing extensive work on the site at the time and by his leaving a comment on the Cameron Moll blog which brought hundreds of requests for an image file stored on his server). And again we can see that a plateau has been reached.
Much of my time is spent in grappling with the problem of how to increase traffic beyond what we have already achieved. One of the things that I have been forced to learn about is Page Rank. Google ranks pages on the net according to a secret formula and it is this that decides where in a list of search results that page will appear. The higher the page rank, the nearer the top of the results the page will come. The ranking is out of ten. Mad is particularly proud that his index page recently went up to 6/10, which is an exceptionally high ranking for an individual site like MadTV. My blog hovers at 4/10, a good ranking for a blog but not good enough for me (I told you I'm greedy).
So how do we improve page rank? That is the question that all the webmasters would like to know the answer to. I have seen long dissertations on how Google works them out but all I can tell you is that it is based on a mathematical formula and that the number of incoming links to the page is important. When you consider that the top sites have thousands of links coming in, you realize that we humble bloggers have our work cut out if we are ever to compete with that sort of thing.
I have concluded that page rank is one of those things I can't do much about. Google likes me quite well for a mere blogger and I can't really complain at that. But it does leave me wondering what else I can do to reach all those people out there who are just dying to read my blog (although they may not know it yet). If anyone has the answer and doesn't mind sharing it, I'd love to hear it.