Wednesday, December 18, 2013

Looking Back: 2013 and the Blog

After the catastrophic collapse of traffic to end 2012, it looked like a bleak year coming up for From the Sidelines. Being a small blog and because I don’t work on promoting it, pageviews are highly dependent on organic search traffic from Google, Bing, and Yahoo – mostly Google. Every tweak, alteration, and seasonal mucking about of that mighty search engines algorithms seems to affect it. UPDATED with final figures.

2013 Traffic Final

Above is a graph of the traffic for 2013 according to Google Analytics. December has taken a downturn that reminds me a little of last December. A lot of reports of weirdness from search engine watchers makes me suspect that changes are being rolled out yet again.

In the end, December leveled out to my surprise. It seems the blog rebounds after every change Google makes now. As the trend shows since the middle of the year, traffic isn’t growing and is unlikely to.

The most visited posts for 2013:

  1. Another Day, Another Referral Spammer
  2. Topblogstories Referral Spam
  3. India’s Bantam Weight Fighter: The LCA Tejas Displays
  4. From the Sidelines (the home page)
  5. Again With the Spam
  6. Ohbelog Referral Spam
  7. First Referral Spam of 2013
  8. The ‘Burbs (1989) Review
  9. Secret Spam
  10. Godzilla vs Biollante (1989) Review
  11. Spirited Away (2001) Review
  12. Gorgo (1961) Review
  13. A Tricky Bit of Spam
  14. Movie Reviews (index page)
  15. A Failure to Load a Spam Site
  16. Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind (1984) Review
  17. Spam, Lovely Spam (index page)
  18. Dracula (1931) Review
  19. The Last Starfighter (1984) Review
  20. Godzilla, King of the Monsters (1956) Review
  21. Pacific Rim (2013) Review
  22. Nearly 2000 Movies Taken Off Netflix

The last one amuses me a great deal because the hits for that are usually looking for the movie Taken on Netflix. In fact, I increased the list to twenty just so I could include that little fact.

Wow, what a shake up the last couple of weeks did to the list. Suddenly my reviews are getting hits again which forced me to go up to 22 in order to keep the paragraph above.

If you check out the post recapping 2012, you’ll see that posts on referral spam dominated the top twenty. Only Dracula (1931) and Godzilla, King of the Monsters (1956) returned from from the top fifteen and only due to my expanding the list. It’s a bit annoying that merely one film review made it into the top ten. So much for movie reviews.

Then Google’s latest tweak happened and movie reviews are being found again. Two are now in the top ten and eight of the top 20. Maybe there is hope for the reviews yet, though spam dominates. But look at the LCA Tejas post! It went ballistic at the end of the month thanks to the warplane being in the news over in India.

If it weren’t for the public service of posting warnings about Blogger referral spam, my traffic figures would probably be as bad as I expected back in January. It looks like the boat has sailed on organic traffic for many a website, so I shouldn’t complain. At least I haven’t cratered with no recovery.

While I’d like to do a direct comparison of traffic from 2012 to 2013, the simple fact that I’m writing this early makes that unwise. Instead I’ll list the pertinent figures for the past year with an eye towards editing the post after New Years.

Now I have the final figures and I’ll insert 2012’s next to them in green.

22,490 (9,386) unique visitors generated 38,198 (20,369) pageviews for an average of 1.55 (1.86) pages looked at per visit. Average stay was 53 (1:15) seconds, bounce rate was 81.69% and 91.12% (85.74) of the people coming were new visitors. The first figures are an increase while the latter indicate shorter looks at the content.

2013 World Map

Visitors came from all over the world for a total of 157 countries and territories. That’s an increase from 124 for 2012. For me, this makes up for the lack of huge numbers of people visiting. One of the promises of the World Wide Web was that it would be world wide. This is why I resist Google’s push to localize everything and haven’t set my region for the blog.

Another related fact: ten percent of my visitors to the review of The ‘Burbs are from Europe.

Little things like that make the time and effort put into From the Sidelines worthwhile. I have no clue how 2014 will pan out other than I’m going to keep writing.

2 comments:

Hanny said...

I don't get tons of traffic either. I began Stone with the hopes of getting followers and practice writing, but now I just use it as an outlet. It feels like a group therapy for me almost. What I mean is that if you put a lot of effort into something that gets 10 views, that's okay, because you've produced a quality piece that will last.

Patrick D. Boone said...

Amen to that, brother.

I don't remember who first said something to the effect of writers write to write, but there's a great deal of truth and wisdom to that.