01.30.04

Increasing Traffic but Time for You to Comment

Posted in General, Science and Technology, Personal at 12:00 am by Jeff

I have good news, and I have bad news. First, the bad news:

In April of last year, traffic to Jeff Doolittle dot com peaked and I was excited about the amount of unique visitors I was receiving–that is until I reviewed my site’s tracking log. I use a tracking program that tells me how someone has found my page. This program tells me, for example, if someone found my site via Google, or from a website that links to mine. If you keep a photo album on the ‘net, take note because the results of my review were disturbing.

You see, I used to have my family photo album exposed to search engines, and these search engines would index the captions I placed under each picture. I became aware of the problem when I placed a caption under a picture of my daughter kissing a friend on the cheek. The caption read “kissing the boys.” To my chagrin (and disgust) the majority of traffic coming to my site last spring was from people searching for phrases like these.

Once these people found the site, most of them left, not finding what they were looking for. This, however, did not relieve my concerns about the kinds of people perusing pictures of my family. In response to this issue, I put into place the security mechanism that you now see on my photo album page. This mechanism allows any visitors to my site to see the pictures, but it keeps search engines from getting to them since they cannot read the digits in the image and submit the form for access.

The bummer was that once I put my security program in place, traffic dropped exponentially (-2% in May, -24% in June, -31% in July and -55% in August). The decline finally leveled off in August and remained flat until December, 2003.

Now the good news–blogging has rescued this site. In January alone, traffic to this site has increased a whopping 222% and is now approaching the peak of last April. What is most encouraging is that apparently the quality of visitors to Jeff Doolittle dot com has improved. Rather than misguided pornography seekers, the majority of traffic is now coming from people looking for information on economics, politics, religion, news, science and technology. I’m also noticing an increasing number of searches for “Doolittle” and “Jeff Doolittle.”

Now it’s time to do your part. While traffic has increased and you are benefitting from the content on this site, few of you are commenting. Rather than just taking advantage of the great links and viewpoints on this site, take some time to interact with me and the other visitors to Jeff Doolittle dot com. I’d love to hear your thoughts and perspectives.

And please, if you’re searching the Internet with phrases like “bathtime pictures,” it really is time to get a life.

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