Among the usual bunch of praise filled comments my previous post has a very interesting comment:

Come on dude.  Update your blog.  How do you expect your website to be a success with no updates?

Good point – how am I going to be successful without frequently updating this blog?  The song sung every week by  the choir is “Frequent posts lead to success”.  The preacher thumps his fist on the Good Book and sprays the first row as he shouts, “A website will die if  unattended – DIE!”.  Traffic will decrease, readers will unsubscribe, Google will stop sending you traffic.

Ignoring This Website And How it Effected The Success of This Website

For a couple of months my gaze has been elsewhere.  This website and blog have been on their own.  I have done nothing to prop or push it.  The last blog post was on Feburary 25, 2010.  Three months between blog posts – that can’t be good.

Normally things ignored deteriorate.  Empty houses spawn cobwebs, boards fall off fences, rust grows on pipes.    Without constant care lovers turn into ‘friends’; without constant care pet goldfish start doing the backstroke.

But surprisingly this website  did not  mind that I was gone.  There has been no deterioration, no rotting – the fish did not die.  3 months unattended was no worse for the website then 3 hours unattended.  Actually the fish are fatter and swimming faster.  Some of my stats have gone up in my absence.

Website’s Daily Visitors

Average daily visits has increased by 20%.  Nothing spectacular for 3 months, but pretty good for not doing anything at all.

But if the content is not changing then how can the traffic be increasing?  Without visitors coming back and reading new content you would expect traffic to go down as visitors realize the website is static.  How is it possible that the average daily visits has increased?

The answer is simple.  Even though the limited number of subscribers are not coming back, the almost unlimited number of non-subscribers are increasing.

Website’s Search Engine Traffic

Google seems pleased with my website – it keeps sending more and more .  Although not shown on the graph May 2010 is already at 290 Google visitors and will be at least 350 by the end of the month – making it the second best month ever.

There are millions of internet users for whom this website is fresh and new.  For them 3 month old website is fresh content.  They are looking for answers and this website provides them.  They do not care that it has not been updated in 3 months.  Google knows this and sends traffic my way.

Google does not care that my subscribers have not been provided with new content.  Google is concerned about the millions of internet users looking for answers to their’ how to make money with a website’ questions.  Which of course, this website provides.

Website’s Subscribers

But what about my poor subscribers?  Every morning they check their RSS readers with anticipation only to be disappointed – every morning for 3 months.  The agony and despair they must feel.  You can only court a crush for so long until repeated rejection forces you to look elsewhere.

The subscribers to this website did not miss me at all.  There was no despair due to my absence.  Hearts were not broken, dreams where not shattered.  There was not a mad rush to unsubscribe.   Nobody seem to care that I did not post – no one was angry  enough to unsubscribe.

The only reaction was from the commenter above who pleasantly requested that I write another post soon.  He did not unsubscribe, he simply and kindly asked for more.

This website had  around 80 subscribers 3 months ago and it has around 80 subscribers today.

What Will Happen If You Stop Updating Your Website For 3 Months?

Nothing.

Feel burnt out?  Is the sight of low traffic and no revenue really starting to get on your nerves?  Are you yelling at the dog for no reason?  Are you twirling around on your pivot chair trying to force new content out of your head?  Are you starting to think that the time spent on your website has been a complete waste of time?

If you answered yes to the above then you are like 99% of all webmasters.  You have 3 options:

1. Keep yelling at the dog.
2. Quit.
3. Take a 3 month break.  Don’t worry about your website, it will be there when you come back.

About Traffic, Visitors, Promotion, Actual Stats From The Website Used, What YOU Should Do

This website’s primary function is to provide accurate statistics for its visitors.  How many visitors a day, how many page views per visitor, how much revenue it has accumulated.  My task as a webmaster should be an easy one – get the stats and put them on the website for all to see.  Simple.  What could go wrong?

I am trying to do good in this world.  To bring accurate information to my visitors.  My intentions are pure and well spirited.  The world lacked knowledge about what a new website must go through at the beginning.  I saw the need and made it my purpose to educate.  With my sword of honesty and truth in hand my quest to educate began.

But there are evil forces in this world.  There are people whose pursuit is not good.  Whose intent is to destroy rather then create, misinform rather then education, to take rather then give.  It is these types of people that are my enemies.  Everyday my pursuit of truth and good information is being hindered by these villains.  Instead of focusing on bringing more and better information, I must spend time fighting vermin.

I am talking about spammers.

If I was a catholic missionary in Africa trying to educate the natives about all-mighty God’s preference towards a single sexual position, spammers would be there handing out copies of the Karma Sutra.

Everything I do in effort to better educate and help my visitors is hindered and exploited by spammers.

The Contact Page And How I Must Fight Spammers

The contact page use to have a captcha.  To send me an email visitors had to decipher distorted numbers and letters.  This is a common method used to differentiate between humans and machines.  Humans can read the disfigured characters but machines cannot (yet). Although it prevents spammers from sending me emails it has disadvantages.  The contact page takes longer to load because a unique catchpa image needs to be produced.  And sometimes the image is so distorted that even a human cannot read it.  So my good intentioned visitors must squint and move their head at different angles to figure out the characters – sometimes getting it wrong and having to try again.

To do some good and make it easier for my visitors I removed the catcpcha and replaced it with a simple question: What is 1+1.  Most humans can easily answer this question but machines cannot.  Now the page loads fast and my visitors do not need to decipher a captcha image.

I did good – but what does the universal rule state?  You do good and spammers will take advantage of it.  And they do.  Now I constantly get spam emails about pharmaceutical products.  Because answering the question what is 1+1 is easy, spammers find it worth their time to answer it for an opportunity to spam.  Captcha is too much work for spammers – but 1+1 is easy.  Easy for visitors but also easy for spammers.

I teach the villagers to read and the spammers hand out copies of “Teach Yourself 28 Different Positions in 28 Days”.

How Spammers Bring Traffic To Websites (Thousands Of Unique Visitors For Only $9.99)

At the beginning of every month my server side stats are cleared and begin at zero.  For the first few days I clearly see who is visiting my site.  Here is what my server side traffic stats looked like at the very beginning of the month:

There are 25 unique traffic sources to this website.  Only 7 of them are from legitimate sources.  The rest are spammers.  The most visits from a single source is also a spammer.

How do I know they are spammers?  Because I click on them to find out who they are and why they have a link to my website.  What do I find?  There is no link to my website.  These website are sending traffic to my website without having a link to my website.  How?  Why?

How they do it I do not know.  But because these are server side stats, all it would take is for these websites to ‘ping’ my website for it to show up in my stats.  A ‘ping’ is simply a knock on the door.  These websites come to my server and say – ‘hello, I am here’.  That’s all – they do not come inside and they do not read any of the pages.  They just knock and leave.  This is verifiable because these visitors do not show up on my client side statistics; if they were viewing the pages then Google Analytics would show it, but it does not.  According to Google Analytics these visitors where never at my website – they do not exist.

Why do these websites do it?  Why do these website’s just knock on the door and leave?  The answer is deviously simple.  They do it for traffic.

These websites paid for traffic.  They hired a company that promises 1000’s of unique visitors for $9.99.  As soon as this company receives its $9.99 it presses a button and a program runs that pings thousands of websites.  This creates thousands of webmasters that now have a new traffic source.  These thousands of webmasters click on the new traffic source to see who is linking to them.  Bingo – traffic.  Thousands of webmasters are now visiting the website to checkout the new traffic source.  1000’s of unique visitors for $9.99.

Of course these webmaster are not ideal visitors.  They click on the traffic source, see that it is a spammer, and leave the site in disgust.  But the company selling the traffic does not care – it delivered what it promised – 1000’s of unique visitors for $9.99.

Not only are these traffic selling companies ripping off naive webmasters by sending them useless traffic, but more importantly, they are hindering my ability to do good in this world.

They have rendered my server stats useless.  If I was to report my statistics according to my server side stats alone then it would be misleading information because most of my visitors are spammers.  Instead of showing how many visitors this website receives, I would be showing how many spammers it receives.

Because of these bastards, every morning I need to look at both the client side stats and the server side stats and figure out the actual number of real visitors to this website.

If only there was no evil in this world.  If only I could be left in peace to perform my good works and provide great information.  Instead of spending my time informing and giving, I am forced to hack away at demons who are always trying to undermine my efforts.

I know how the missionary must feel when during the middle of Sunday school one of the students raises their hand and asks, “Why does the Lord disapprove of the Reverse Cowgirl position?”

About Traffic, Visitors, Promotion, Actual Stats From The Website Used