Monday, October 8, 2007

Damn you, Tiburones!

I have a problem with StatCounter, my new love.

Over the weekend, my blog got 15x more hits than usual. All the hits appear to be coming from a google image search (from non-U.S. countries). The image search included "Great White Shark, South Africa," so I figured that people were linking to my blog via an image on my first post. In a sudden bout of panic, I deleted the post that contained the picture, thinking someone might sue me. It didn't change the number of hits...and I think this is because there's still a page in Blogger called "http://deaddinos.blogspot.com/2007_06_01_archive.html."

I don't want a few hundred people visiting my site because they want to stare at a shark! I want to know who's visiting and I can't sort through hundreds of stats. I can't figure out how to fix this...I mean, it's not bad that people are visiting, but the only thing they see is a blank page that says "no posts match your query." That won't exactly turn people on to my blog. I think this is a permanent problem...HELP!!!

These were the referring links and the number of hits from each link:

297 images.google.com/imgres?imgurl=http://www.duiops.net/seresvivos/galeria/tiburones/Great%2520White%2520Shark,%2520South%2520Africa.jpg&imgrefur

96 images.google.co.uk/imgres?imgurl=http://www.duiops.net/seresvivos/galeria/tiburones/Great%2520White%2520Shark,%2520South%2520Africa.jpg&imgref

49 images.google.ca/imgres?imgurl=http://www.duiops.net/seresvivos/galeria/tiburones/Great%2520White%2520Shark,%2520South%2520Africa.jpg&imgrefurl

17 images.google.com.au/imgres?imgurl=http://www.duiops.net/seresvivos/galeria/tiburones/Great%2520White%2520Shark,%2520South%2520Africa.jpg&imgre

6 images.google.com.ph/imgres?imgurl=http://www.duiops.net/seresvivos/galeria/tiburones/Great%2520White%2520Shark,%2520South%2520Africa.jpg&imgre

5 images.google.co.in/imgres?imgurl=http://www.duiops.net/seresvivos/galeria/tiburones/Great%2520White%2520Shark,%2520South%2520Africa.jpg&imgref

The new good news: I'm faxing my application for SVP today!

6 comments:

Julia said...

Hmm. If you had your own domain you'd be able to sort a sitemap and use Google Webmaster Tools. But it's difficult when you don't own the domain. When I put in a picture I amend the link so it goes to the site in question (thus generating traffic for the owners of the pictures). If in doubt stick to Wikipedia, Flickr or Imageshack images, which for the most part can be reproduced as long as credit is given. In time, the searches will be small fry compared to the people visiting your site for YOU, and it can be quite interesting to see some of the weird search terms bringing people to you. I get about 3-4 people each day searching for the picture of the worms or broccoli from Cool Organism Thursday. You've got your StatCounter set to 500, right? If not, bump it up to 500 because that's the new free maximum. You'll find that lasts a bit longer.

Amanda said...

Thanks Julia,

I'm at my 500 limit with StatCounter! I just bought my own domain, but I have no idea how to set it up or how get my blog over there...oops. I really need to stop impulse-shopping...

Julia said...

Okay. Cool. Now what you need to do is to go to www.sitemapdoc.com/, type your URL into the box and follow the instructions. You'll need to save the map as a .xml file on your domain (you presumably have some webhosting facilities?). Once you've got this, go to www.google.com/webmasters and get your site indexed by Google. If it finds any dud links, you can ask Google to remove them.

Your links and archives are looking pretty good though - you've got them all sorted. From bitter experience I'd advise you to stick with the Blogger templates until you're REALLY good at HTML, because the archiving can get really screwy if you don't know what you're doing.

Amanda said...

UGH! I went to sitemapdoc.com and saved the map (but not all of it, because it's got a max of 500 pages). I don't know if I have a host. I signed up through Google Apps to get my domain and it registered the domain through GoDaddy.com. But, I don't know if I have hosting through them. So...I can't really upload my xml file anywhere...and I looked at buying hosting at GoDaddy, but they want me to choose between Linux and Windows and I don't know what the means (I also don't know if I need the hosting....). This is a huge pain in the ass :)...I feel completely clueless!

I REALLY appreciate the help...a lot.

Julia said...

Hmm. The Ethical Husband says you can put in a "crawl request" with Google to go through your site and fish out the dud links. Go to www.google.com/addurl and you should find instructions. There's also a webpage removal request tool (if that page returns a genuine 404 error) within the Webmaster help centre I linked to previously.

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