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Hi Stusshed!
It's ok to be paranoid, better to be careful than sorry. :)
I don't think those 'related links' are the problems because I 'enjoy' this fall of hits alongside with you guys and gals with that function on.
Actually, people can promote their sites by helping each other posts links in hot forums to the blogs.
But... that needs not to be individualistic. ;)
Scope.
It's the weather. During the spring, and summer, people are outside more, on vacation, out of school, etc.
I confess, I stole everyone's commenters :P
:) Funny Diamond!
As to weather - think many of my readers are Australian - the weather isn't exactly getting more Summery this far south!!
And about the "Build it and they will come" - think I stole that straight from "Field of Dreams" :D
An addition to the story:
About 2 months ago, a senior member of this blogging community contacted me with some suggestions to improve my blog. It involved decreasing the number of posts on the front page, and inserting the more tag, because my posts are verbose and full of images, and it was apparently frustrating waiting for my site to load.
The suggestions sounded like a good idea, so I implemented them.
I have been evaluating my stats again tonight, and finally the trend hit me, and then I had an idea about the correlation between the stat drop and the changes to the blog.
From literally that week until now, my weekly numbers have been dropping a steadily 5% every week. My current weekly hit rate is currently about 800 below where it was trending before the changes were made.
Needless to say, I have immediately reversed the main change that I think affected the look and feel of the site - the use of the more tag.
I will now see what happens over the next 2 months to see if the rot is reversed. I really hope it can recover, because the current trend is not pleasing.
I do have one other question that searching the forums hasn't turned up (as a recent thread anyway) - RSS feed hits - are they counted?
I was reading something a while back that they would be displayed separately or something, but I was wondering if they are still being counted in the totals for the day?
RSS hits are NOT counted on your main stats graph. Apparently they do show when you click on a particular post's stats. What use that is, I'm still wondering.
I really think that WP.com should put out more RSS stat info for us, or they risk slipping back into the Twentieth Century.
Hi Stusshed!
I always consider blog hits to be sometimes a nuisance. Point is, when your hits should be high, your posting or postings may be too controversial and you are inviting at times over-sensitive or even aggressive ace-holes to your peaceful hobby.
I suppose just blog along, and when the world's society changes to the taste of your blog, your blog will become a hit. Whether it is a blessing or condemn, you are never sure. ;) Ultimately, the world is loaded with differences, and mankind is not the best in judgement nor are mankind generally trained for that.
For my case, the blog has fallen to just below 50hits. But it's just blogging. I'd just blog, then the world may suddenly find some value of sensation, and the hits go up again.
Don't take your hobby too seriously. :)
Scope.
I'm also a bit concerned re amount of hits. I've had this blog 11 days and have only had 36 hits, no comments, though that doesn't worry me at this time. Even took about a week before I got a spam on it. Its averaging out to approx 3 hits a day?
Hi, Whatsyrproblem!
Blogging is an (new) art. Many paintings were cheap till their painters died. But bloggers blog by right as an hobby.
Many new arts and designs took time to be embraced, or hot, or recognised. So do blogging. Googles take sometimes almost forever to register us if we are not patient.
So take it easy. Becos you'd soon find that hits is not the only problems, or hits is really not a problem at all when there are currently more absurd problems around for bloggers that we'd have to confront together.
Scope.
@ Raincoaster - thanks for that. It might explain some of it, although I only just recently went to fully exporting the posts to the RSS feeds (ie they get to read the full article). Better for the reader, worse for my stats. It is something I thing WP should address - it is site traffic after all.
@whatsyrproblem - 11 days is very very new - I was getting those sorts of hits at the start too, but with work, and content they grew. My blog is approaching a year old, and the hit rate is now around 500 a day. So keep posting and watch it grow, but expect a slow start. If your information is interesting, the first few readers will continue to return, and then as new ones come in up go the stats.
@Scope- Blogging might be your hobby, which is cool, but for me it is a serious pastime, and it is attracting an increasing amount of business attention. I would like it to grow to the point where it can become my business, so yes, I take it seriously.
So, so far these seem to be the possibilities:
1) It's something WordPress is doing or not doing. Within this, it's either a change WordPress has made which has had the effect of not sufficiently getting blogs "out there" so they can get more hits, or it's a change WordPress has made in the measuring of hits.
2) It's nothing to do with WordPress, because it's happening to bloggers all over the place, whether they use WordPress or another blog provider. With this, it's either the rise of Facebook/MySpace that's to blame, or it's the season (spring, nice weather, etc.).
Although I don't make money from my blog, it's more than a hobby to me. It's a form of self-expression and validation, and it matters a lot to me. If I'd never had more than fifty hits a day, I would be very pleased to be getting that many now, but it's hard to feel good about it when it once was routine for me to be getting almost twice that many. (I realize one possibility is that my blog has become less interesting to people, but I don't think that's it.)
I have considered switching to Blogger because of the flat-tire effect in my stats, but if the bloggers over there are reporting the same kind of drops, I guess that wouldn't solve the problem.
It really does ebb and flow, tnaron. I'm just not one to blame it on something or someone, as I've seen some do in this thread. Not that I'm saying anything's wrong with that, just saying! I've been on MSN Spaces, Live Journal, Blogger, Movable Press, Typepad and finally WordPress; over the years. It was the same everywhere I went. That's why I stand by that when it's slow, it's time to give one's blog some loving. Work on your sidebar, research future articles, social network to bring more into your circle (blog catalog is a great resource). It's like a job. When things are slow at work, one tends to do all the filing/paperwork that they don't have time for when it's busy.
Hi there!
Guess I am staying around, ie. if there is nothing really going wrong with WordPress.
But I am concern about the result when I used Copyscape that says what Google API can't get my readings or something like that. So can someone check it out as I have put this down this forum elsewhere as well.
It maybe just a short 'trend issue' due to some technical problems. Or some jealous eyes over WordPress. Or you know... some states are getting jittery as WordPress hosted some of the most furious political blogs, and some states have great people willing to spend money to do something about it.
No matter what our intentions may be for blogging, one thing is clear cut, if there is any temp problems with WordPress, solve it. So far, to my experience, this blog host is the best outside China.
But I do suggest that front page promotion should be allowed for those free users. I mean, for those who have paid, they will naturally get bigger and more regular coverage, but for the rest who are on free, at least there is something on the same page covering randomly WordPress blog as if we are covering a press. Those paying are the headlines or the 'ads', the rest who are on free are just news. Hopefully, this will excite things.
Having a few paid blogs featured may sound cool. But assuming comparison between a lone paid shop and a hub of shops, it'd always be hotter with a hub. Hence I suggest WordPress to have team for entertainment column, another for politics or current affairs and so on. Then we'd feature the paid sites and do some 'news' or mentioning of the free sites. Or simply just let the system randomly picks blogs up.
This is way better than the 'related posting'; and we can make a new forum attached to that page so that the entire community can gather there, know each other, visit each others and make things hot together. Then, we won't even need search engines. WordPress may try to develop a eventually fully powerful search engines just for WordPress blogs.
Scope.
Don't blame the weather people!! whatsyrproblem, make your name into a link.
Yeah I'm noticing the decline too. Just last week I was getting 150+ hits a day and now I'm getting about 30 - 40. It's so anoying! Less commenting too.
Hey tnaron,
I average 700 to 1,200 hits a day, depending on the topics that day. Since my blog is political in nature, my traffic is predicated on what events are going on in the country and the world.
I think there are more blogs than ever and thus, more competition for readers. Luckily, I started to build a loyal reader base more than a year ago and most of my "peeps" have stayed.
Sometimes I have a 1,000 hits in a day and only a 200 comments. There are a lot of lurkers -- probably more lurkers than people willing to leave comments.
Do you maintain a blogroll? In my experience, this helps build readership. Do you leave comments on other people's blogs? Again, in my experience, people usually return favor and comment in return.
I don't think WP is responsible for your lack of traffic. Recently, they've done some screwy things like implementing the new, dreadful dashboard but that shouldn't impact your traffic.
Just a few thoughts.
It is spring in the Northern Hemisphere... I was just wondering if less people are at there computers...
I have gone from 50 a day to 30 a day to about 12 yesterday. :(
I'm starting to think there is a WordPress problem. All the various reasonable explanations might account for a 15% fluctuation. It's hard to see how they'd account for blog hits completely falling off a cliff, which is what they've done. Either WordPress was grossly overinflating the stats before, and they're counting them accurately now; or else they were counting them accurately before, and are now grossly undercounting them.
Does anyone know if Blogger, TypePad,etc Blogs are having the same problem??
Yes, they are but it seems as if no one believes me mwhoch546 LOL I'd encourage people to talk to their buds on other platforms. I have and they're all saying it's slow right now :)
I really do not think there is any problem with WordPress... Mine has been rising ever since its started (overall). I have no idea why some blogs' stats are falling but I doubt this is widespread. Again, I think its important to remember that the forums are not necessarily representative of the 1 million active blogs on WordPress. People coming here do so because they need help. And people who wrote on this thread wrote because they had a similar issue. Does it prove that this is a WORDPRESS problem? Im not so sure...
I have to say that if my stats were regular then yes I would be really surprised. Isnt it more close to the truth if some days or weeks fluctuate in terms of hits? I would find it more extraordinary if the numbers of people coming were always the same (at whatever level ).
There seems to be a shift in what is popular. Satire blogs are popping up everywhere and they are the Hawt posts on WordPress, in a couple blog communities I am a member of.
Maybe its readers taste are changing, at least for a while.
It's Mother's Day today in many parts of the world. And a very happy Mother's Day to each of us.
diamondfistwerny is right: I have blogs on many different platforms, and hits are substantially down at ALL of them. I don't know what it is, but I'm not very happy with it.
Don't know about you guys but I've been having trouble with Technorati. Not sure if that is related to the stats thing or not. Mine have been pretty consistent, maybe a little on the low side, which I chalked up to folks being tired of politics :)
Technorati is completely borked; as far as I can tell, it doesn't seem to function at all lately. It will recognize and list links to my blog, but it will not integrate those links and change my Authority or Ranking based on the new links. It's broken.
Well, for some reason, it stopped updating my mapped domain blog and won't take a manual ping.
I've noticed there are some bog-standard WP.com blogs it's not updating.
Something else to consider:
When did categories stop getting treated as tags?
At one stage (when tags first got introduced), categories still worked - I could do a search of the WordPress blogs for a particular topic and those with that category appeared. It doesn't anymore.
I have noticed on a number of occasions now, that when I search for a term (or when I Google it and get links to WordPress's search), that only those tagged with the term are found, and not when they are categorised with it.
Google finds the link to WordPress Tag Serach, and Tag Search responds with "there are no blogs tagged with that term (or words to that effect)". I know there are - mine.
I wonder if this is contributing to a loss of hits - people are searching for, and no longer finding the answer that is in my blog?
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fairlane
thelifeofmarkwhitecotton
stusshed
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