Today begins the second year of this blog. It’s been an education.
Here’s the obligatory breakdown of my first year:
- This will be the 299th post
- The blog has garnered almost 7000 hits
- The blog has been viewed by 137 countries
What fascinates me the most is the variety of search criteria that has sent folks this way.
Factoring out the “miscellaneous” search phrases (like “walking stick heavy end up or down”…hunh?), some things become clear.
- People are very curious about the relative properties of dishware
(“porcelain vs. stoneware” — 30% of search hits) - People are as interested in my writing as they are in some of the recipes I put up
(both at 14% of total search hits) - People are nearly as interested in what a “peeper’s dry plate” is, as they are in my writing
(“peeper’s dry plate” — 9% of search hits) - Movies, Seattle, and general writing topics each took in 5-7% of the total
It’s all just nerdy gee-whiz sort of figures, but it shows that I’m meeting my two major goals:
- I’m writing something on a regular basis
- I’m providing a way for my readers and potential readers to learn about my writing
So, my thanks to all of you, both subscribers and passers-by, for your interest, your comments, and your encouragement.
k
Unraveling Time
Desert Wind
Ploughman's Son
Ploughman King
The Year the Cloud Fell
The Spirit of Thunder
Shadow of the Storm
The Cry of the Wind
Beneath a Wounded Sky
Cryptogenesis: A Memoir
Kurt R.A. Giambastiani 
We’re now in our 3rd year, about 700-800 posts in.
We’re willfully ignorant of our stats. I can tell though, that we’re getting more eyeballs, or at least that our google ranking is going up. It’s at the point now where googling “cheap seat” will make our website appear high up the first page of results (usually 2nd behind an airline ticket seller), even though “cheap seat” is a common term. When we started our website link would show up on page 5 or 6 when using two of the three words in the blog name.
Additionally, the spam filter is catching tons more comments than it used to. It’s gone from the low hundreds to ~5-6k per month. At least the bots know where we are…
It’s notable that our google pagerank is still “0”, while Kurt’s at “1”.
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A lower pagerank, but tons more spam. Weird. (Not that a pagerank of ‘1’ is high…)
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My suspicion is that the spam increases geometrically or exponentially with total posts on the blog:
50 posts = 100 spam/month
100 posts = 300 spam/month
250 posts = 1200 spam/month
500 posts = 6000 spam/month
Like that.
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Hmm…I have 300 posts (in the first year) or 25/month.
I get something like 60-75 spam posts/month.
Your blog has more “brand name” stuff in it, though, with the Sports and Beers and other segments. I wonder if that drives more spam to your blog…
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My first year just came up as well. I, too, find it fascinating what search terms people use. Most of the ones that come to me smack of pornography searches. Talk about disappointing my readers!
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Something tells me you’re not disappointing your readers, just the trolls. And it was your post on search terms that got me looking at what hits sent people my way. Some are real head-scratchers.
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It’s interesting how may of us started blogging at more or less the same time. Was it something in the water I wonder? Congratulations on the first year and here’s to many more.
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Thanks, Jon. Sorry I missed your 1st year milestone, last week. Congrats to you also; you’ve accomplished quite a bit this past year.
I don’t know if this is typical, but it _feels_ like I get a pretty large percentage of UK hits…nearly a tenth of the US total. UK is definitely my second largest visitor-base, but that may be average.
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