I am also a geeky stats watcher. Search engines are the prime linker. I have a lot of images on the Swank Pad, and I think that Google images is a big culprit in the many hits to images. It's a very new thing on the 'net to be able to just search for an image. Actual referals from other site links is always pretty tiny, with a few surges when some big traffic site posts something.

I also notice that the subscribers cause a spike in sessions as I post. If I post a lot, I get a lot of sessions. That seems logical enough!

As much as I love images.google.com when I need an image, I hate it in terms of what it does for traffic on my site. They hoover up my images without ever looking at my site or adding anything. It has made me really consider watermarking all my images. That time may have come for all of us to do that. I have put it off for years.

For a test, look at the search terms on your referals. Pick some odd term and try it in Google images and see if you are in the first page. That's how I solved the mystery of so many hits on the Swank Pad for "white skirt."

I used to block google image search in my .htaccess file, but all the blocked referral messages in my stats finally made me remove it.

I actually get quite a few visitors from the image searches who stick around to view the rest of the images in my galleries, but yeah, they almost never visit the 'blog.

Btw, thanks for linking my entries to the front page of the Swank Pad. I do get a fair number of hits from it.

One thing I've noticed is that I've beening reading more blogs in my net-based RSS reader Netvibes. This means that when I follow a link in a blog, the referral does not come from the blog with the link, it comes from the rss reader. This can skew stats, although it *should* leave some evidence behind in having sites like bloglines, Netvibes, and Google Reader be higher in your stats.

Just something to think about ....

Hanford: I am seeing a fairly large number of hits from RSS aggregators, but I'm specifically concerned with the fact that other 'blogs aren't linking to my posts as much as they used to.

I always read "Eye" in my RSS reader. But to answer your question, I think you should stop checking your site stats and just start writing about what interests you. After all, I hope you keep the blog for your own personal enjoyment, not for other people.

After getting annoyed at my site stats for two years I finally stopped checking them a few month ago and it has relieved a lot of the stress and pressure I used to associate with blogging. Besides, this article poses that site stats aren't as accurate an indicator as we think they are.

One last tip though — do you use trackbacks when you link to other sites? Doing so would at least provide a link from that site back here...

Brittanie: I've always written about what interests me, but I also derive a lot of pleasure from seeing cool things I've found propagate around the blogosphere.

For one, I sort of gave up trying to "really" blog. I never got more real comments than Spam, rarely got linked, etc. If I had just gotten lost in the noise of all the other blogs in the world, that would have been one thing; but the spam angle just ruined it completely. Trackbacks and all that jazz were invented to both help traffic AND get interested eyeballs on interesting posts. Like most of the net, it's turned into a flood of insta-revenue spam crap with a surfiet of signal on top of the noise.

All that whine being whined, I do wonder how many "marginal" bloggers like myself just got disgusted and quit? Because it seems neither profitable nor easy to run a small blog, however sincere the voice crying out in the wilderness.

I disabled trackbacks on my old site, and never re-enabled them when I moved here. They never did anything as far as I could tell, and they definitely attracted a lot of spam.

Upgrading to Movable Type 3.2 seems to have eliminated most of the comment spam problems I was having.

It's one thing to never find an audience, it's another when you find one, then see it start to slip away.

I meant more to use trackbacks on other peoples' sites — when you link to someone else, leave them a trackback to your post, which will link back here.

AND... I don't want to hear any more bitching. You just got linked by Boing Boing!

Brittanie: as I said, I've used trackbacks in the past and all they brought me was spam, so I'm reluctant to enable them again.

And if I sound like I was bitching, it was unintentional. I really was looking more for constructive suggestions about how I could make my posts stand out better, rather than having a whine-and-cheese party.

Cool. I haven't been linked to BB in quite a while. Nice to see that Mark F. still pops by.

Aww, I was just kidding 'bout the bitchin'.

I'm not too familiar with Movable Type since I use Wordpress, but I get a lot of spam. However, two plugins — Spam Karma and Akismet — make sure none of it ever hits my site. Once a week or so I delete all the comments marked as spam and they never make it "live." Surely there's something similar for MT?

It's okay. I probably *was* bitching just a little.

MT has a very good comment-spam plugin, but I'm not sure how well it works for trackbacks. They caused so many problems, that most bloggers don't seem to use them nowadays. I'll have to do some research to see if it's worth turning them on again.

Hey Mrb, Not sure you really got the kind of answer you were looking for. Not sure I can offer it either but I can give you my point of view on it.

The Goof has become more focussed I think in this new incarnation and as such it would follow that you've made it a better site for people interested in tiki / lounge / exotica / punk / etc. But obviously there is the flip-side. That's a comparatively small group. People may still read the Goof religiously, but not be "able" to fit its content into their own "format."

Second, there are WAY more bloggers out there today than ever covering every eclectic subject and sub-set imaginable.
I think with all that crowding people are naturally tending to specialize, and so everyone's reach settles into a core group of devotees. Also everyone and their brother has a blog so people need not travel as far from that core group to find content. Again just a thought.

Truth is I don't know why you'd see such flux. Maybe people are just thrill seekers out there looking for the "new" thing rather than being "loyal" linkers?

Aside: I don't use an RSS reader. I just visit, and I heartily wish more people would do the same. Annoys me sometimes to have gone through the trouble of subtly crafting a site which people then read in an automated text-box.

Anyway, pretty sure that didn't help but figured I'd give it a shot.

P.S. I selectively remove vowels and otherwise shorten / mangle words in my image titles to cut down on google image hits.

Jamie: thanks, your comments were quite useful because they a) agree with what some other bloggers have told me privately, and b) agree with my own thoughts, so I think a consensus is beginning to emerge.

Funny thing is, I don't see the Goof as having become more focused, at least not when I take a look at my archives. I think the *perception* is that I've become more narrow in my interests. I have done a lot of tiki/lounge/exotica posts recently, so maybe the other stuff I've posted that doesn't fit into those categories is just getting perceived as noise in the signal.

As for using RSS readers vs. visiting sites, I don't see any real difference. If I read a site via Bloglines, the RSS reader still has to go to your site and pull the data back into my aggregator. Sure, I don't get to see your purty formatting and mad design skillz, but the ability to read many blogs in a very short period of time is a real sanity-saver for me.

Yes, pageviews and "hits" are a horrible way to judge real traffic. My admin has been using Urchin and traffic is marked by sessions. That is closer to true traffic.

I also watch my hits on the feeds, atom. Each post accounts for X hits there for those who subscribe. Those folks are not browsing me, but are reading.

I use Word Press and trackbacks. I get almost no spam. My admin is very diligent with these things and does his own email spam filtering and incorporates that same filtering into the forums and blogs to prevent crap from getting in. It has been great. If you need a new host, try mine. Deal with a real person instead of a corporation. And spend less probably! www.catalystit.com

There is also less netiquette (sp?) out there. People post on their blog without giving credit.

I'm one of the folks using an aggregator from LiveJournal. I read your stuff religiously, people who visit my 'friends' page definitely do as well. If I repost links to your page from my own blog, my friends would just see your post followed by my post linking to your post.

Swanky: the only statistic I'm concerned with measuring (at least for the purposes of this post) is the number of times other blogs link to my posts, thereby spreading the linky goodness around to the rest of the Internets. Thanks for the hosting recommendation, but I'm paid in full at Dreamhost for another year, so I won't be going anywhere soon.

Matt: thanks for your religious devotion! Please leave all sacrifices and monetary donations at the front desk. See you Saturday at Psycho Suzy's.

Dreamhost has Spam Assassin, but they have it turned off. You will definitely save money and time deleting spam by moving to Catalyst IT. Dreamhost's support guys used to work for Catalyst.

When I commented about RSS readers, I was referring to the possibility that other blogs may be linking to you, but you'll never see them in the stats because RSS readers act as a middleman that eliminates accurate refferal information.

Swanky: I'm not spending a lot of time deleting spam now, and I'm actually pretty happy with Dreamhost's support, so I'm staying put for now.

Hanford: I see your point, and I agree that it's probably skewing the stats to some extent, but I doubt that it's totally obscuring the referring blog yet. I think there would still be a few hardy souls out there who'll click on a link from the 'blog's main page.

Looking at your Technorati listing, ranked at 32,000, I'd say you are doing pretty good on the inbound links. 32,000 sounds just awful, but, that's up there amongst the blogs I visit. Humuhumu has you beat by a few thousand though... But, you came first, I would expect you to have more.

I don't put a lot of faith into Technorati's rankings, but 32k is quite a bit lower than where I was a couple of months ago, so that would seem to validate my contention that I'm getting fewer inbound links.

Blogschmerz again?

I can feel your pain - and your thoughts (like mine did) going in circles.

You have good content, you have been around for a long time and still you only have a small audience ...

Overall I see the following trends:

* Videoblogging: most of the hot action is with videoblogs and youtube these days. Even big communities like Metafilter suffer from Youtube postings.

* More Blogs eat more eyeballs: there are way too many blogs out there and eat away each others visitors.

* Blogging is mainstream today: people are no longer so excited about blogs these days - especially since bigger outlets also provide quasi-blog-stlye writing.

* Obscure & Exotic: too many blogs cover 'weird' stuff today. It's almost like a competition - the weirder the better. So in that context your blog ain't so special anymore.

* RSS: I think that more and moer people eat their daily news dish via newsreaders - and thereby ignore great sites and designs (just like j. said). On the other hand - I use feed reader myself - it simply saves a HUGE amount of time, when you are a blogjunkie.

* myspace & community: the biggest bringer of traffic is Myspace - maybe you should open a special Profile there and link with tiki people.

* Linking: people are lazy - they no longer care about linking and exchange.

* network: is there already a tiki link ring? Maybe you guys should team up more?

Yours truely

Dr. Blogschmerz

One more thing ...

I started blocking Google and Images very early - because I don't consider them REAL traffic, just noise. Most searchers came to my site for pr0n, pr0n and pr0n. Most 'serious' search terms (like art or politics) didn't make to my site ...

Vielen Dank, Herr Doktor Blogschmerz!

MySpace? Nein Danke!

orangeguru & jmorrison had some great perspectives that I mostly agree with -- here's my perspective, as an extention of their general thought direction:

It seems to me (this is purely anecdotal, and not backed up by any real figures) that there is a lot less "link blogging" going on these days -- the thousands of people with new blogs seem to be more into creating their own content, rather than focusing their site on linking out to other things they think their readers might find interesting. It's a bit counter-intuitive: with more all-over-the-map blogs out there, you'd think there would be a greater reliance on the ones that simply point you to the cool stuff out there. I suspect that some of the newer bloggers may not see or understand the power in linking to and from other blogs.

You've already pointed out that the focus of your query here is wondering specifically why more blogs aren't linking to yours, and this is again off-track a bit, but I gotta say it -- don't worry about it too much. The medium and the tools to track it are just piss-poor at determining how far your voice is reaching. Based on the meager comments, traffic & linking my blog gets, I wouldn't think anyone was really reading it -- but I've been recognized randomly/on-the -street three times -- every time has been because they read my blog, not because they recognize me from Critiki or Tiki Central. Go figure.

@Humuhumu & @all

I guess what Mr.Balihai (and many other long time bloggers) suffer from is 'ignorance'.

It simply sucks being a faithfull servant of blogosphere - feeding the beast with good postings and some unique thoughts and input - and STILL being ignored by 'the others'.

For me personally it feels like screaming at an empty space from the top of your lungs - just to receive silence - more or less.

But each blogger is more or less a King of his own Hill (or Tiki Bar). Collaboration is rare, so are links and trackbacks these days - UNLESS you offer naked flesh, some free downloads or tech tipps.

Amen.

Dr. Blogschmerz

Thanks for the interesting discussion, all. The blogosphere is clearly changing, so the question is: how do I change to remain relevant (assuming I was relevant in the first place)?

For whom or what do you want to be relevant? Wanna be the #1 Tiki site or do want to diversify and include a broader range of topics / audience?