I’ve been checking in to Mac5’s recently installed stats. Web statistics are always informative. I like that Eric is getting a lot of hits for not knowing how to spell “renege” in Euchre and people search for it the same way he spelled it.
Also I wondered about why the site was getting referrals from sites that were obviously junk ad sites (web4u). It seems a lot of people with blogs will show a list of the most recent referring websites on their page (I guess because they can). So these companies have web bots that do referrals so that they will in turn become listed as one of your referrers. They don’t really expect people to click on the links as much as they hope that Google will see how many websites link to their website and increase their rankings.
However in a recent attempt to find out why Google has forsaken me lately, I found that Google has turned the tables by using the number of sites that link to yours *against you* in the rankings. Apparently Google has to make constant changes to their search algorithms to keep ahead of junk ad sites and in an effort to provide better search results. It’s Spy vs. Spy all the time. They must have made a big change at the end of November when I noticed the drop off on my site. Now people are complaining because Google is sending fewer people to their websites and they aren’t making as much money. So they complain that Google has no right to destroy their business like that. Amazing.