Blogging About Blogging, Again
Last month I looked at my site stats and was all starry-eyed about the traffic I was getting. But a closer look at the numbers revealed the vast majority of it is just spammers and bots (spammers trying to flood my comment form, and search bots indexing my site). Instead of the 68,000 monthly visits listed in my site stats, the number of visits by actual humans is about 6,000 a month (not counting my visits, if you want to assume I’m human). That’s still a very nice number though 
. My most popular posts are ones about programming, travel in Japan, and pho. Time to write more pho reviews!
I just changed my permalinks to use the blog post titles rather than the post ID numbers in the URL, as I’ve learned that Google very heavily weights the words in the URL. AdSense does this too - my “technobabble” category, where I mainly discuss programming, keeps showing ads for DJ gear, presumably because of the word “techno” in the URL. I may drop the ads - I’m earning only about $1/month, which is a joke. I figured I’d keep them if they at least covered my monthly hosting fee, but it’s not even close.
I was nice and put in 301 redirects for my popular posts, and spiffed up my 404 page for anyone who gets lost. The very funny 404 Error Pages: Reloaded collection inspired me to create my own 404 page, giving a new purpose to a great drawing by my brother John.
I’ve been battling with the spammers using various techniques over the years, and I’ve finally settled on reCAPTCHA. I’d resisted using a captcha (as I don’t think non-spammers should have to bear the burden of my spam problem), but reCAPTCHA is nice because it’s actually productive work: the results of the captcha are used to help digitize books.
September 25th, 2007 at 2:19 pm
Hey Mike, write more about JAPAN!! onegaishimasu.
matane
ACE