The Real Blogger Status

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Besides knowing your visitors, an important part of maintaining your blog includes knowing how your visitors found your blog . And that involves monitoring the inlinks to your blog . Inlinks can be either dynamic (search engine result page hits), or static (bookmarks, blogrolls, feeds, linklists, and text based links in other peoples blogs and web sites). Dynamic inlinks are important, because that's how people find our blogs initially (though after the random access from " Next Blog ", which now is irrelevant to posting volume ). Static inlinks, on the other hand, are truly exciting. Each static inlink represents a real person out there in The Web, who thought enough of our contribution (at some time) that they will say to their readers Hey! Here's a blog like mine, with more content that you may want to read! When you see static inlinks, you know that your blog is truly a part of the Web, not just the Internet (and no, the two aren't the same!). To help us ...

Recently, we see periodic queries about strange visitors to our blogs. Why does my StatCounter log show odd links into my blog? What is "www.blogger.com/navbar.g?targetBlogID=", and why do I see traffic from that link? Why am I getting strange traffic to my blog after I publish changes? All of these questions, until Mid November 2009, were related to the same thing - the "Next Blog" link in the Navbar. Now, all of this is changed . When you publish to your blog, your blog goes into a huge database, listing blogs just updated. You can see a replica of this database in the Recently Updated Blogs list. The RUB list is huge - it shows a 10 minute slice of Blogger publishing, and at any time, will have from 4,000 - 8,000 entries, with new entries constantly being added (just as old ones drop off the list). The RUB database is important to the Blogosphere. When anybody clicks on the " Next Blog " link in the Navbar, an entry from that database results ...

If you have a web site, or another interest that's discussed in a web forum, occasionally you may need help. And no matter what your problem is, if you look long enough, chances are that you'll find a forum where your problem will, or has been, discussed. That's the nature of the web. And if you find help in a web forum, it's possible that the forum posts may refer to a web site like PChuck's Network , or maybe The Real Blogger Status , for detailed instruction. And maybe you'll be so happy to have your problem solved that you'll post a link, to the web site where you found help, in your web site. Everybody benefits, in the long term, when you add a link to a web site where you found help. The other web site benefits from the inlink. You benefit, because you have a record of where you found help, should you need it again. And your readers may benefit, should they see the link, when they need help too. In the short term, though, the situation is ...

Active visitors produce, and are produced by, search engine weight. I talked enough about knowing who your visitors are , but that's not the only relationship that you need to consider. Besides incoming search engine links, there are links to your website on other websites. Some are provided by your friends, others by folks you never meet. The latter are gold. Many search engines will give weight to your website based upon incoming static links. Occasionally, you'll see, in your visitor logs, a referral link from an unknown website - and not from a search engine. When you see an incoming static link in the visitor log, investigate it. If the website has similar content and style, you'll both benefit if you add a backlink to that website. The other website owner will benefit from your new static link. You'll benefit when other folks visit your website, and see your outlinks. These other folks will benefit, because they will be encouraged to link to you also. Which ...

Most Blogger blog owners, and publishers of various websites, shouldn't just write content, blindly. Blog and website owners need to know who reads the content, too. Some folks learn about their readers from the comments left by them. If the website is a blog, and if comments have been enabled, then some readers will feel moved to leave comments about specific posts. Both Blogger and WordPress, and probably other blogging services, provide for comments. For regular websites, and for blogs without comments activated, you may be able to use Disqus . Disqus provides commenting on non-blog websites, and on blogs where more control (and separate from Blogger connections) is desired.