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?”

Last month this website did not make a lot of money.  No surprise.  I have become comfortable not making money with this website.  My world would be in chaos if this website made money.  What would I do?  How would I act? Who would I be?

Obviously making money does not motivate me to keep this website.  For motivation I need to look elsewhere.  Like the man who is suddenly happy because he finds an unscathed sock amongst the ashes of his burned down house, I too have something to smile about.

The Search Traffic Graph

There are many graphs on this website.  But none of them please me as much as the organic search traffic graph.  If I was a father and graphs were my children then the search traffic graph would be my favorite son.  The one that makes me most proud, the one that is going to grow up just like dad, the one I always take fishing.

When everything looks bleak and I start to feel like Sisyphus, all I need to do is to look at my beloved search traffic graph and everything becomes alright.

Every month organic traffic increases to this website.  Last month was a huge increase.  Almost 500 visitors from Google – twice the amount compared to the previous month.  For the entire year the graph is almost a perfect 45 degree upward slope.  For the last few months organic traffic has been doubling every month.  If this keeps up I will have 8,388,608,000 monthly visitors in 2 years.

It is a well known fact that to increase search engine traffic you need two things: time and backlinks.  As more time goes by the amount of search engine traffic should increase naturally – the older your website the better.  Google checks the date your domain name was registered to determine the age of your website.

(It is also claimed that Google checks the expiration date of your domain name.  If your domain name registration is about to expire, or registered for only a year at a time, Google thinks you are a fly by night operation – maybe even a spammer.  It looks better if your domain name is not close to the registration expiry date and is registered for the next three years.  It is claimed – I am not sure if it is true but it makes sense to me.)

Besides time you also need backlinks.  The last few months were a guest post frenzy.  Continuously spinning the lever on the guest posting machine gun:  Problogger, Dailyblogtips, JohnChow, Blogsessive.  Not because I want to entertain and inform people, I do it for the backlinks.  And it works; the graph keeps stepping up and up – 8,388,608,000 monthly visitors in two years.

The Real Value of Search Engine Traffic

500 visitors a month is not a lot.  There are websites a lot younger then this one that receive more search engine visitors in a single day.  But that does not make me envious because not all search engine traffic has the same value.  Some visitors are worth more then others and mine are worth more.

Google sends me visitors who are searching for “how much money can be made from a website’ and variations on this theme.  These are valuable keywords – I know because I tried to buy them.

Last month I created an account on Google AdWords.  I wanted to buy traffic.  I was going to pay money to have my website appear on search engine results in the sponsored links section.

I opened the account and then 30 minutes later I abandoned the account.  Visitors for this niche are expensive.  Imagine someone does a search on Google for ‘make money with website’.   My website appears on the side of the search results, if the person clicks on my link then I pay Google around 5 dollars.  5 dollars to have somebody land on my website, look around, and leave.  My earnings which took a year to accumulate would be gone in 4 hours.

Of course if I thought that the visitors would buy the ‘website starter kit’ then 5 dollars is a small price to pay.  I would be paying 5 dollars  and receiving 65 dollars when a paid visitor buys the starter kit.  To break even I would need 1 in 13 paid visitors to purchase the starter kit.  Being a realist, I know that is not going to happen.

My keywords are expensive so I cannot afford to pay for visitors.  But the flip side is that this website receives valuable visitors from search engines.  People looking for ‘make money with website’ are worth a lot more then people looking for ‘how to comb down a cowlick’ which  cost only 5 cents per visitor.

Last month I received 500 visitors from Google.  Visitors that if I had to pay for them would cost me around 2500.  In other words, last month I saved 2500 dollars.

This website receives only 500 search engine visitors a month while other websites receive 500 visitors a day because the ‘make money with website’ niche has a lot of competition.  Visitors who want to make money with a website are worth more because they spend money.  Visitors looking for hair combing tips do not spend money and that’s why they are worth only 5 cents – nobody wants them.  Other websites get 500 visitors a day, but these are messy haired visitors without a dime to their name.

Other websites get 500 search engine visitors a day worth (500*.05) 25 dollars a day or 750 dollars a month.  My visitors are worth 2500 a month.

Now all I need to do is figure out what to do with these valuable visitors.  I have them but how do I use them – how do I convert their value into cash.  People come to my store with cash stuffed pockets – how do I get them to give me that cash.  So far they just walk in, look around and leave.  Some of them accidentally dropped a few pennies on the floor but the bulk of the 2500 dollars that came through my door left.  I need to convince visitors to give me their money before they leave.

How to make visitors give me their money?  My days are spent thinking about this question as I lovingly gaze at my beautiful search engine traffic graph.