I’m certainly not addicted to web stats. This blog has a Google Analytics marker but I don’t follow the statistics on a regular base. After all, I’m blogging for fun and I don’t need to keep my audience at a certain amount or don’t need to attract more visitors – even if a growing audience is very rewarding. That’s a good opportunity to thank all my readers! 😉 Did you also notice that no commercial ads are displayed here? (Except for some specific security events or podcasts but they deserve!)
On the other side, I keep an eye on the server logs. I’m addicted to “logs”. They provide very useful information about your visitors and their behavior. Never forget: You need logs and you need to take care of them. Event if they contain non-critical information, the same details may get a very high value in the future when you’ll have to investigate a security incident. Think about this…
So, while reviewing the log file of the web server running this blog, I found something interesting. I published my last post yesterday at 18:40 GMT+2. Google fetched and indexed the data less than three minutes later:
66.249.71.147 - - [29/Aug/2010:18:41:01 +0200] "GET /2010/08/29/back-online-2/ \ HTTP/1.1" 200 15085 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Googlebot/2.1; \ +http://www.google.com/bot.html)"
Another statistic? Since the beginning of this month, the Google bot hit this blog 30056 times! Ok, honestly, blogs are not the best references. Lot of blogging platforms notify Google when new content has been published with messages such as “Hey, Google, I’ve something for you!“. But regular websites are also very often “crawled” by Google. A small forum maintained by myself (with a very low activity) has been visited by Google 3509 times this month.
What does it mean? If you publish some content on the Internet, don’t expect a chance to bring your data off-line. The time to read this post, they already have been indexed! Bots like the Google one have powerful algorithms and know where to find relevant information. “CTRL-Z does not work on the Internet”
This internet thing’s kind of random, as much as we read about SEO permitation and make efforts to advertise our site’s / blogs or other there still seems to be a nagging problem with search bots, spiders and engines which refuses to leave honest people alone.
With ever increasing diversity, routes to advertising, social networking and ad hoc self publicity – twitter, facebook, Open Forums, development communities on google and reddit to name just a few..
I find it difficult to beleave that this sort of activity could refute to raise more than 17 views and 11 followers on other channels!?
The re-tweet’s alone showed higher numbers, from the source than are presented on the hover buttons per post detail!
hijacking, blocking / diverting public and private networks or their traffic for personal gain.. problem space between admin’s ears! – could be.. even looked into a ‘Flesch’ and ‘Gunning Fog’ test for my blog, reviewing search engine optimisation and whether in actuality any portals take content or its composition into consideration when registering sites for ranking – or is it just a money thing!?
The concept of a free user space still hasnt resulted in a more moderate onslaught of these meglomaniacs despite all their published knowledge..
Good to scope these things for free – build up a user base, before buying hosting..
http://dotdevelopment.wordpress.com/
It’s all about Google Caffeine, almost all the blogs are indexed now in less than 5 minutes after posting something. WordPress has automatic ping aswell, so it’s normal to be indexed fast, in minutes.
Hello,
Yes, I agree that Google is *very* fast and this is one of the reason for their success.
But your new blog posts might also be indexed so quickly because some people tend to read them via Google Reader (I do so for example): Whenever somebody refreshes the feed and a new post pops up, Google crawls immediately the data for the search engine. Thus, adding your feeds to Google Reader may speed up the whole crawling process 😉
Regards,
Marc