Peter's Blog

A google for "peter's blog" puts this site above the Blue Peter Blog!

Still top for 'Peter the wow noob'

I'm going to mention the phrase 'peter sublime hunter skillz' and see where it gets me.

UPDATE: it worked, no 1 google result next morning It also works for 'sublime hunter skillz' which is even better

Cross me and my wrath will be top of the google search results next day. So there.

I've been using statcounter to track visitors to this site for a few years now. While my site5 hosting also provides awstats I prefer StatCounter as it uses javascript for the tracking and so is less likely to track bots and other rubbish.

The free statcounter service used to show the details of the last 100 visitors to a site. My site gets around 1000 visitors a day so 100 visitors is maybe two hours worth. Statcounter have now increased this limit to 500 visitors which is more like half a day and consequently more interesting.

Currently the most popular page is this one about using T_hunderbird with M_icrosoft exchange (see what I did there? don't want this page getting those hits). This page about f_ence sprayers has had a lot of traffic recently, it being spring and folk wanting to paint their fences. There don't appear to be many public forums for people to air their f_ence spraying grievances and this has become one.

Remember the search engine wars? Here is a status report:

If I were yahoo I'd drop the exclamation mark. Microsoft are nowhere to be seen.

I get lots of World of Warcraft related hits, lets look at some recent wow related searches:

• how to get skill up in weapons faster in wow
• wow daily quest
• wow g11 g15
• good way to earn sara armor
• winterfall flight path
• tanaris to ungoro crater foot
• world of warcraft fast firing ammo bag
• good prot aoe spots
• how to use the g15 in wow
• titan panel download patch 2.1
• heroic tactics

(that last one was wide of the mark).

It makes me wish all this info was nicely laid out and not in the heavy stream of consciousness format.

The warcraft stuff has boosted the page rank of this site to four which increased the number of visitors a day by about three or four hundred.

I'm not getting a kickback from Statcounter but despite that I still recommend them.

Thanks for coming.

I've added no real content to the blog for months and let things stagnate. I move servers to save a bit of money and suddenly my page rank goes from 3 to 5. Is it because I am now on a US server and google has a low opinion of the importance of pages based elsewhere?

Do I care since it is probably a glitch? However, if it stays at 5 it could be time to cash in with some ads and affiliate links

I have missed blogging and feel guilty about not updating the site, especially the two pages of comments awaiting approval.

UPDATE: a week later and looking at the sitecounter stats there is no significant difference in traffic.

I had an odd comment on this site:

Google PageRank carefully explained and what you can do with it - written by top SEO experts. Here is link for your readers; pagerank-prediction.com/

Going to the site (which had page rank 4) it looked like a legitimate description of the page rank algorithm except that at the end of it were the words "v7ndotcom elursrebmem". Strange.

A search for this phrase reveals a pagerank contest, many sites quoting the above phrase, the one getting top ranking on google being the winner.

To get past my comment filter someone had to submit this by hand. Someone really wants to win that prize if they are going around manually linking everywhere.

Maybe now I've put the phrase here I stand a chance of becoming an also-ran!

I haven't looked at pagerank recently.

Peter's blog finds this site in the first page of google results.

Peters blog finds it on the second page in one article where my punctuation slipped.

Moral: use proper punctuation.

One of my sites is just a placeholder, a default Wordpress installation with a theme installed and the links tweeked. It has been sitting there for a few weeks waiting for me to sort out moblogging technology (damn vodafone scribble all over their mms emails).

I was surprised to see that somehow it has google pagerank 5, two more than this site. Looking at it's backlinks it has 321 (this site has 11 ) and if I go to any of these supposedly referring pages there is no mention of the daily whinge. On the one hand I don't care if the site is accidently pageranked high, the thing that bothers me is that it links to this site and could be giving it a pagerank boost that could go away at any time. Could this be the source of weird fluctuations in google hits? Hits are up by about 100/day since my last vent.

One other thing that I don't understand about backlinks is that dailywhinge is not listed as a backlink to this site although I know for sure that it is.

I suppose google would say it's all beta software...

My visitors are declining.

(courtesy statcounter).

There are two possibilities:

• google is turning it's back on me
• other people with better pagerank have started to write about similar topics.

Given the slope, I'd say it was probably more the latter Wouldn't a google change cause a step?

I'll soldier on until I get no visitors, then I'll just troll forums like the other attention seekers.

Update: as one commenter has suggested, maybe the readers are converting to RSS. I do value RSS, I read bloglines all the time. I could theoretically bump up my visitor count by only putting short teasers in the RSS feed so folk have to come here to read the whole article but I don't like that in the feeds I read. For example at Planet Python this trend is spreading enough to tempt me to unsubscribe. The teaser has to be very appealing before I can be bothered to go to the site to read the whole article. I only tolerate it on the BBC RSS feeds where getting entire articles would be unweildy.

Google have released a Google Toolbar for Firefox Now I can lament my poor pagerank without having to boot IE.

It appears to do all the auto form-filling and stuff that it does on IE and it can search gmail directly.

Update: also has autolink. Hope Dave Winer doesn't find out.

Doing various Google vanity searches I discovered that an image search for Victora Wilkinson brings my baby daughter up on the first page Wife wants her picture to be found so here for googles benefit is Bisi Wilkinson:

I'm not sure that the google image index is updated that often so it could be months before this appears in any search results.

I've been getting about double the google hits to my site in the last few days. I suspect my pagerank has gone up a step but the IE google toolbar still says 3. I think that thing uses servers that lag the actual pagerank.

Someone hit my site while searching for Peter Easy:

• should I be worried?
• should I be insulted?

Looking at stats, I had 20% more visitors yesterday and looking at pagerank, it is back to 4.

Thank you google, sorry I called you bastards.

Here's another plug for Google maps uk because it is just so cool.

Update: half hour later and it's back to 0 again. Buggy toolbar? Crappy internet connection? Vindictiveness? Who knows.