Stardate 20010923.0809 (Crew, this is the Captain): My most common referer is Google, by a long shot. I routinely get in the neighborhood of 30 refers per day from there, sometimes more, according to the Cobalt "referer" summary page on my server. I'd always assumed that this was just Google's crawler visiting me, I haven't been able to find the base log file where Apache saves that information, but the Cobalt summary pages also list the top 200 visitors and show their refers, and I was just looking through it, and indeed I am getting a lot of legitimate hits from there. If you hunt for "
CDMA FAQ", I come up first. But that is because of how Google's ranking system works; my
CDMA FAQ is heavily linked from other places, including especially from about.com (from which I also get a steady stream of refers) and since about.com ranks highly with Google, the fact that they link to me instantly grants me credibility with Google's rating system. But it occurred to me that Google actually can't differentiate that part of my site from any other, which means that my whole site has that same credibility rating in Google's eyes. As a result I may be coming up high in other searches. But I have no idea if it's true. I tried a few other searches for keywords like "beautiful women" and "terrorism" and I wasn't in the top fifty or so (which is where you have to be to get much traffic). On the other hand, when I searched for "
terrorism theory" I came up second. So if people are interested in trying to drive hits to their site, there are two things to do: have something to say, and
register with Google.
(discussion in progress)
