Who can you trust?
My hits for today are in the tank, I think. I don’t usually get a lot of daily hits but on average I’ll get about 200 a day, with as many as 2000 on some rare occasions and around 500 or so several times a month.
But today, like I said, hits are dismal. I think. Sitemeter shows that I have a whopping 23 page views today. Not visits; page views. So, I start checking around to see what’s up and open the referral log on my server. Hmmm. 40 referrals. Page views usually run anywhere from 50 to 150% times referrals. Oh well. I have pretty much accepted that the free online services are but general guidelines anyway but it still pisses me off for some reason.
Same with TTLB. When Bear rebuilt his indexes a few weeks ago my incoming unique links stat was knocked down by about 2/3 to somewhere in the mid fiftties. Now I am back up to almost 100 incoming unique but my rank keeps falling the more incoming links I accrue. If I look at the listing for Marauding Marsupials, for the past week I should have been ranked somewhere between 3300 and 3500. Today I have 95 unique incoming and I am ranked 4044. In the big list of Marsupials, the last blog with 95 unique incoming links is ranked 2613.
At least I am back to being a marsupial. I had been hanging with the riff-raff in the rodent section for the past couple of weeks even though I had enough incoming links to be with the marsupials.
The onliest thing I can think of is that Bear’s ranking formula must be docking me for some of my incoming links. If that is the case, I would rather not have credit for the links that are docking me. Here’s why:
Like I said in a previous post about Search Engine Optimization, the ranking systems like TTLB and Technorati are for the most part useless in the greater scheme of SEO. But… If you are a webmaster who is trying to optimize your site for search engines, those ranking services provide valuable feedback as to the success, or lack thereof, of your SEO efforts. If the stats coming back are whack, a lot of value of the ranking is lost.
Speaking of whack stats, Technoratis has me with 6 incoming links. WTF! I hardly ever go there anymore. Except for maybe to find out what not to blog about.
Same with Sitemeter. If I am trying different things to increase my traffic, and I do not have faith in the counter, then how do I make decisions about which strategies and tactics are paying off the most? Or more accurately, since this is a post about accuracy, how can I be confident that I am making the right decisions on how to spend my efforts if I have no confidence in the information on which those decisions are being based?
Short answer: It is very difficult.