I find the data generated by my web site to be very interesting. Big time web players study such data carefully in order to optimize their web business. I study such data because I am curious.
I have noticed a specific down turn in traffic lately. One factor that seems to have changed is the number of hits that result from search. So, analytics can determine the referrer for a hit and I can identify hits resulting from searches.
So why might search hits diminish (aside from the obvious possibility that I write about stuff others find less interesting). Here is something I wonder about. Can Google tell the difference between a link farm and a social bookmarking service?
One prominent variable in the Google ranking strategy involves the number of sites linking to a particular site. A simplistic way some have tried to “game” this system is to set up multiple web pages with links to other sites the scammers would like to see ranked higher in Google searches. The Google ranking model attempts to identify such artificial way of creating more links (link farms) and to discount such sources.
There are legitimate sites that consist largely of links to other sites. For example, a social bookmarking service or even a simple effort to archive useful sites as a service to others would consist of content with high link density.
One of the services on my site was developed as an open source bookmarking site. I became interested in a service called Scuttle because it allowed me to operate my own bookmarking site. It was written in php/MySQL and I spent time adding some features. I created a ranking systems based on the number of times users actually visited one of the sites listed. I also created a way for users to evaluate the sites (one time only) when conducting a search and this also contributed to the ranking.
I have had some difficulties with this site. I ended up disabling the evaluation feature and the login feature because both involved users logging in and logging in allowed users to add links I might find objectionable. There was one upgrade to Scuttle. I did not make the transition because of the changes I made to the original and the lack of enthusiasm for starting over again.
I am not trying to decide whether I should delete this service. It does generate some activity, but it also causes problems. As a hobbyist I enjoy creating resources for others to use, but I do not want my other content to go unused because the content would infrequently surface in searches. There must be a way to figure this out.
