The stats service I use gives me the last 20 referers to this site and then the last 20 search engine searches. Currently these two listings are identical give or take two or three. Now, back in the day I didn’t mind getting this kind of traffic but it’s getting kinda silly when 85% of my readership is coming from Google. It also renders totally void the seemingly impressive increase in visitors this site has had over the last few months. Am I getting more popular? Or is Google just indexing me like a rabid dog? I suspect the latter so I’m running a wee experiment. During the next month Google will NOT be indexing this site thanks to the robots.txt file I’ve uploaded (more info here). By the start of October all my pages should be off the Google site and by November I should have a good idea of how many actual readers this site has.
In the meanwhile, howabout a listing of non-search engine referals? That’d be, like, useful.
hmm – interesting post – could you not redirect your visitors to a different site using a script that reads the referer? i think taking the robots file is a little heavy handed – a more elegant solution is to use scripting to handle the traffic.
bergin
Yeah, could do, but this is just for a month. I want to see what effect stopping it completely will have.
Actually, I had an idea the other night – I reckon I’ll try having two archives, these normal ones (with comments, etc) which will be blocked from Google and another set just with the posts for search requests – that way I can keep the Google rabble away and track my real readership.
Just an idea, mind…