Why have my hits dropped since the release of version 6.0?
Try and understand what your stats really mean.
The harsh reality, that many people don't like to hear, is that their blog is never as popular as they think it is. Sorry.
Why?
Because, the majority of your hits come from automatic bots and search engines. For example, Google is your biggest culprit, they will come in and happily crawl your site daily if it feels it needs to. MSN is another huge crawler that will over crawl your site.
This is a known problem in the search engine world; why must this happen if the content isn't really changing that much. Well Google took steps to fix this and came up with the SITEMAP protocol. You produce an XML file that tells the search engine what files changed and when. It no longer has to crawl your site and look for content. The SITEMAP XML file can tell Google which files to look.
So using SITEMAP will have the Google hits drop like a stone; because its no longer required to crawl every page every time. It only crawls the pages that changed. All our blogs are now producing the SITEMAP file automatically for the search engines as it is in everyones best interests.
Now the sudden drop off may be explained by the fact that last week we introduced SITEMAP for all the search engines on the back of their big announcement a couple of weeks ago that Yahoo, MSN, Google and ASK would now be supporting it. You can read about it here:
http://www.computerworlduk.com/technolo ... ewsid=2547
So this means now, we are advertising your SITEMAP file (that we automatically produce) and advertise it automatically to ASK.COM and GOOGLE.COM. Yahoo/MSN haven't yet advertised their public notification endpoints, but they are using the robots.txt of self discovery.
That is one reason, and at the moment, we are seeing Google taking up the SITEMAP torch very aggressively, but the others are being a little more sluggish. Although MSN, seem to be requesting it so we'll see.
Also, anyone that publishes their FULL posts in the RSS file, are also losing real hits. BlogLines etc will happily consume this feed and then republish it themselves; now if someone reads your blog in BlogLines, they do not need to come to your site to read it. Check your agent logs to see how many subscribers you have via BlogLines; if you have any you will see it. For example, in my own agent log i see:
That means that when I publish an entry, there are 55 people that will read it, but will not register on any of my hit counts. They don't need to come to my blog unless I entice them in through the entry itself.
So, there are lots of reasons why your blog stats may be down, but more likely than not, it is to do with the way we are now handling search engines as per their own new rules, mostly in and around the SITEMAP protocol.
Now the good news is that this SITEMAP reduces your bandwidth and overall makes the internet a much faster place to be.
Hope this helps a little to go to explain what may be happening. But let me assure you Shazzer, no matter what any blogger tells you in terms of what they think their "popularity" is, in reality, its way way lower.
What can you do to figure out how popular your site really is? Well look at these metrics:
- How many people do you have on your mailing list?
- Ignore all requests for .RSS requests; these are bots
- If you don't publish your full body in the RSS feed, then the number of reads each entry is getting should be looked at. Of these, assume around 10-20 of them are search engines requests (depending on how popular your site is)
- If you do publish your full body in the RSS feeds; then check your agent log, to see how many subscribers you have from some of the major RSS aggregators (aka Google Reader, BlogLines, etc)
- How many comments do you normally get? Now, a little shock here, but the majority of blogs do not get comments, its something people tend not to do. I for one, never leave a comment anywhere! Comments are usually left by the same hardcore readership you build up.
- Blogs that discuss "what i am doing/what i have done" type, have never a huge appeal. They only appeal to friends and family and rarely come up in search engine results.
- Blogs that offer a fix/tutorial/teach/review are very popular.
There is no magic bullet, but the thing to remember, that there are two types of "readers" on your blog; humans and robots. Its up to you to figure out the real ratio, since many robots pretend to be humans to fool ya!