March 27, 2006

[Stats] Blog Stats

I've had a few posts by an commenter bringing some of my stats into question, so I thought I'd lay out how I measure my traffic.

I use AWStats to track visitors to this site. The stats update about once every 12 hours. I use AWStats because it shows me not only who is visiting and when, but how they enter the site, where they come from, what they were searching for, etc.

I average between 4,000 and 5,000 unique visitors per month. Of these, ~600 are aggregators...people who only subscribe to the Atom feed.

I get about 2,700-3,000 links from Google and other various search engines per month. So far this month, the top queries have been:
  1. 8004022a
  2. whatip
  3. michael russell
  4. handcuff
  5. t teen
  6. blg
  7. windows media center
  8. sharpziplib
  9. quake4 font
  10. ffdshow

The top 10 pages on my site this month have been:

  1. The main page of the blog;
  2. A post about the different types of "Quality Bars;"
  3. A semi-humorous post about Yoko Ono killing my Zen PMC; (Side note on this one...most of the backlinks seem to be from an accidental link from an Asian porn company)
  4. A post on how to fix Windows Media Player 10 error 8004022a;
  5. A comment about the .NET Framework on the Xbox 360;
  6. My October '05 archive page;
  7. The WhatIP? web service interface;
  8. A diatribe about how the gaming community's single-minded focus on Jack Thompson could be hurting their cause;
  9. A tutorial on how to do a clean installation of Windows XP Media Center Edition on an HP Media Center PC; and
  10. The human-usable version of WhatIP.

The remainder are from a variety of sources. To be honest, most people tend to refer to me in other people's comments.

I don't include traffic from people hotlinking to my images, although there is some of that going on. I don't include traffic from spiders, or from aggregation services.

Do I get a lot of comments? No. I average about 5 new comments on the blog a day. I generally get three legitimate comments, one troll, and one piece of blog spam. I delete the blog spam, but I leave the rest. After all, if a person thinks strongly enough about me to take time out of his or her busy schedule to insult me, that's generally a sign that either something I'm doing needs to be addressed or that someone has issues with me personally. Either way, it's better to have it out in the open.

No comments: