People have often questioned what the affect of irregular updates on a site have on their traffic ranking. Blogs have been introduced to many websites in order to help keep them “fresh” and make sure that search engines come back often. This has a direct impact on advertising earnings as well as visitor loyalty.

We’ve been pretty inactive on this blog over the last couple of weeks and we’ve noticed a decrease in our stats across the board. A stats package such as Google Analytics can help track these trends and here’s some proof to the topic.

The first thing most people look at when tracking stats is pure traffic; how many visits did the site have over a period. This can often be a misleading statistic depending on the purpose of your blog. Do you want many people coming and not doing anything else but reading what they found on Google, or would you prefer a few less people but they are an active part of your site commenting on posts and starting conversations which in turn increase the user experience of your site?

Let’s have a look at the visits on this blog over 2 separate time periods.

The last time period of consistent updates on this site was from 01/2009 until 04/2009

01/2009 – 04/2009

These stats show a pretty consistent amount of traffic over the period with it having the usual of trend of spike dip spike where the first spike becomes your new average after the 2nd spike (we’ve noticed this trend across a number of our sites).

Now we look at the period 04/2009 – 05/2009

04/2009 – 05/2009

The images speak for themselves.

Next we look at “visitor loyalty”. When it comes to blogging, visitors are more likely to come back to a blog that is regularly updated than a blog that seems to be dead and forgotten. This is a harsh rule and can apply rapidly. For example; if you have been running a blog for 2 months and have managed to make at least 1 original post per day, people start to see this and will come back every day to read what you have to say. But then, you go on a long weekend holiday and don’t have an update for a couple of days. Next thing you know your stats are showing a decrease in return visits and less traffic from search engines etc. The word “loyalty” in blogging can be thrown around loosely. To me it doesn’t carry the standard definition of “faithfulness or devotion to a cause or person”, but rather something along the lines of “I’ll keep you around while you’re of use to me”.

01/2009 – 04/2009

04/2009 – 05/2009

This is the “loyalty” I mentioned before. Returning visits are down and there is a steep decline in the 2nd period’s graph. The other sharp decline can be seen in first time visits. A blog will never build up a base of returning users if users never get to the blog in the first place. Most of the blogs I frequent were found through Google – I was looking for something and came across an answer on a blog and enjoyed the content and as a result I know frequent that blog to see what else is going on. This is probably one of the most common scenarios in building up a returning user base.

Search engines enjoy new content. If a site is regularly updated it is seen as a good source of information and search engines will give it preference over “stale” blogs. Search engines can be just as cruel as visitors and will drop you in the blink of an eye.

01/2009 – 04/2009

04/2009 – 05/2009

You can see clearly from these graphs that when the blog was being kept up to date with regular posts, the amount of referrals from Google were on the rise. This doesn’t just relate to the new content i.e. the latest posts being the most searched for but also some of the older posts that have been crowed pleaser’s for a while. When your blog becomes less attractive to Google even your most popular posts will start drifting off to the 2nd page and even further down on the search engine result pages.

To put it quite simply, no matter how popular your blog is today it can be a baron island that no one can get to in a matter of days if you do not work on it.

This is the first time that we are entering the competition and would appreciate your support. Nominating us is easy! Just click here or click the image to the right.

I think there might be 1 or 2 upsets this year with past winners and “sure to win” blogs getting knocked out of place by newer blogs that are simply better. That’s the great thing about a contest like this, everyone ups their game to try and get not only an award but also the publicity that comes with winning.

Big up to the guys that have organised it.

We’ve been trying to work out the difference between a great day on AdGator and a terrible one to work out whether its worth our time at all, and stumbled across some peculiar stats.

Firstly, I still haven’t found anywhere on the site that actually says it doesn’t pay you for non-South African views or what defines what is a South African view but I’ve assumed that its true based on what IMod has said and that “ad impressions” seem to have no bearing what-so-ever on earnings.

So we’re comparing Febuary 2 and Febuary 4 because Feb 2 was a killer day and Feb 4 a terrible day. In order to determine the south african ad impressions I’ve included Google Analytics data about our visitors on those days (because Ad Gator doens’t tell you). I’m assuming their system for determining South African’s is as accurate (or should be) as whatever analytics uses (IP to Country is pretty easy and reliable, we’re not talking about cities).

Febuary 2
Analytics South Africa:    19 visitors     3.79 pages
Total South African page views: 72
Total ad impressions (adgator): 2050
Adgator earnings: R6.68

Febuary 4
Analytics South Africa:    22 visitors     1.27 pages
Total South African page views: 27.94
Total ad impressions (adgator): 2307
Adgator earnings: R0.45

The important information here (assuming it is south african only) is that we did a total of almost 28 views on Feb 4 compared with 72 views on Feb 2. Clearly, Feb 2 did more traffic but only about 2.5x more. Now if you compare the earnings you see the discrepancy – Feb 2 earned around 14.8 times more!

Anyone care to try and make sense of this? I know they don’t guarantee anything and I’m not expecting them to; but 2.5x more page views meaning 14.8x times more money has to mean there is something behind the scenes we aren’t seeing.

How long until we can get statistics on how many ads we actually showed? Why are these being hidden when they could even just be showed numerically? What use is ad impressions if it has no bearing on money earned? What’s really going on ?

From breaking the news some time ago on the Text Link Ads site design rip to being left in the dark I really don’t know how much work they are putting into this service which originally promised us thousands of rands a month after entering our page views into the calculator.

The criteria for the competition was

• Relevance to the topic
• Insight
• Adding to the discussion

Based on this, we’d like to award the prize to Denouncer of Xboxgaming.co.za for his input on the IEC website saga. We’ve added a link to xboxgaming.co.za on our blogroll.

We’ll be running the same competition from today until the end of February, so keep the comments coming!

Has anyone in another vertical received other ads?

We will be selecting the winning comment based on the following criteria:

• Relevance to the topic
• Insight
• Adding to the discussion

Not sure what to comment on? What about one of our latest posts:

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Tip 1: Comments

Make sure your site is comment friendly! This doesn’t just mean having a comment form on your blog posts (but is of course a neccessity), but also asking questions to your readers like their opinions or experiences about a topic.

Also keep in mind that you can offer your users a kickback for commenting by linking to their website in your comments. Consider not using rel=”nofollow” tags on the comments to entice them. Also remember to reply to comments, whether you are simply saying “nice comment” or responding to questions they had – engaging your users will keep them coming back.

Then an important tip is to use a plugin which allows users to subscribe to comment updates per post, such as the one on this blog. If a user has commented chances are they will want to be told when someone replies; and this is an easy way to get users to return to you.

Tip 2: RSS

Make your RSS subscription options obvious – use services like Feedburner which allow users to subscribe to your blog via email. RSS is an easy way of getting your posts out to the internet and attracting users. Also keep in mind that users reading your posts through RSS need a reason to come to the site – ask them questions like I’ve said above, and they’ll be coming in to comment.

Tip 3: Bolding

iMod recently posted a great tip which may seem pretty simple, but can really make a difference: bolding. The idea behind it is that you bold a relevant sentence on the 4th of 5th line of a blog post. This will draw in a users attention, and help get them to read and engage your post.

Tip 4: Quality Content

There is unfortunately no excuse for quality content – users who know you write long, useful posts are more likely to come back to you than people who think you are running a splog. If you want to build users write about topical content that is likely to continue interesting them, and before you know it you’ll be on their favourites list.

Tip 5: Advertising

While we advertise on our blog, there is a fine line between making some money and detering users which is all too easily crossed. It is true that embedding ads in your content, popunders and such get higher earnings and click throughs – but they also cause your blog to have less return readers. Don’t make it look like a splog if you are after a long, growing community as opposed to a quick buck.

I hope you’ve taken in some of my suggestions, and if you have any others (as I’ve said before) please let us know!

I haven’t even started on the single post/page look and feel; but the front page is nearing completion aside from the tag cloud etc.

If you have any suggestions please feel free to lodge them

Vault9 is a South African community of computer, games movie, television, graphics, and pretty much anything-interested individuals, coming together to help each other and share — and ultimately to have fun!

Its completely free to get signed up, and you’re more than welcome to take a browse around…