What Generates Traffic?
For any blogger, the quest for more traffic is never ending. Moving Muckbeast has made this quest even harder, as I’ve lost page rank, all sorts of links, etc. But one of the weirdest sources of traffic has been a link to an image in my Hellgate London post. Apparently, my link to a picture of the the Hellgate Templar named Avalon generated 50+ unique visitors per day on my old blog. The visitors arrive from various foreign versions of google. Now, obviously that is not super useful traffic, but it is still nice to have, and I have a feeling that google-related traffic really helped my page rank.
A few questions and the picture itself after the jump.
The censored version of the picture: 
For the fully uncensored version, click on the picture. You might have to click on it a second time to make it full size.
This raises a few questions:
1) What are good ways to improve blog traffic?
2) Do you have ANY idea what is going on with all the foreign google sites linking to my link of the Avalon Hellgate picture?
3) Should I care?
Well,that’s not surprising! It’s a chick with her pink parts hanging out. Boys love that!
Yeah, but I am not even hosting the actual nude one. I just link to it. And somehow that attracts a TON of traffic from tons of foreign versions of google. It doesn’t make any sense.
And I’d like to figure out how to redirect it to THIS Muckbeast rather than the old one.
It might be because it is one of the few pictures of the subject that works in google images with safe search on.
I had something similar with my “year in India” blog describing my expat adventures a while back. One of the posts linked a Sharon Stone picture (from the interview scene in Basic Instinct) as a snarky response to the fact that one of my friends could not access it while he was on a business trip in Shanghai. It became the dominant source of incoming traffic on the blog. Since it was a personal blog hosted on Wordpress and aimed at friends and family, I eventually yanked the link.
How has the migration worked out? I know that I only got around to updating my RSS reader today.
Blog: Interesting point about the safe search. I’ll have to keep that in mind when making thumbnail graphics in the future.
David: The migration has gone pretty smoothly from a technical standpoint. I had to manually repost the articles I wanted to save, but that was not super difficult. Setting up the software, theme, and plugins took a bit, but I am impressed by how well it worked. I have wrestled with painful web forum installs many times in the past, and it was much easier and smoother than that.
The only big loss is the traffic. I was up to 500+ unique visitors per day, (I don’t know how many pageviews) and pretty active comment contributions. So we will have to see how long it takes to re-establish that traffic.
Thanks for updating your subscription, David!
Black Blobs on Boobs = SAFE… SCNR.
SCNR?
I support black blobs as long as a click on the pic reveals the full story.
Are you aware that googling for “muckbeast” shows up the old blog first, and this one nowhere at all?
At least, so far. Be worth getting some links to the new site, though.
(This should have a line break. I’m testing this comment box as well as posting some semblance of content.)
Having the redirect from http://www.muckbeast.com to frogdice/muckbeast may be diluting your pagerank. Not sure how that goes. Getting links to http://www.frogdice.com/muckbeast is probably the best thing for pagerank, although it means that if you ever want to change the URL, you’re scuppered (whereas if everyone linked to muckbeast.com, you could just change the redirect).
Okay, let’s see how this goes. Hmm… paragraphbreakend para…
I think it will take a little time before the old Muckbeast fades. I wonder if I can put garbage on the old one for now to kill its pagerank?
The old blog used http://www.muckbeast.com as its main url as well, and it didn’t seem to hurt the pagerank. http://www.muckbeast.com as well as the today version both were PR3.
Do not worry too much about page rank. Marketing, advertising and all that are fine and dandy, but quality rarely goes unnoticed. God damn Google and page ranking.
SCNR = Sorry, could not resist.
It also bares mentioning that any ‘duplicate content’ you have on both blogs may penalise your rankings here.
As it goes I imagine today.com has alot more authority than muckbeast.com or frogdice.com meaning that your content on today.com will rank higher than your content here.
Your content here will no doubt be dubbed ‘duplicate content’ and ranked accordingly.
I’d either suggest removing the content on today.com entirely or on the other side of the coin. I’d take your best landing pages on today.com and place a small note pointing to the ‘new post’ on the ‘new site’. It should aid in funneling the old traffic.
As for the killer question, What generates traffic? Content and Linking. Linking is easy, even easier with widgets like MyBlogLog allowing you to keep track of who’s visiting and there blogs. The secret to gaining a great readership is being involved in the community and being involved cross blog conversations with other bloggers.
I’d also suggest, whilst on the topic making your RSS a little more prominent and placing it above the fold! For RSS stats and ‘easy to read’ RSS feeds. I’d also recommend FeedBurner.
Yeah, the duplicate content thing is a pain. But I cannot delete posts older than a week or so from the old blog, and I don’t want to lose them so I reposted them here. It is unfortunate but I’d rather take the google hit than lose the posts.
I am always interested in linking up with other blogs about MMOs, game design, etc. So if anyone with such a blog is reading this post, send me a mail: muckbeast AT gmail (you know the last part).
Aren’t there RSS links for posts AND comments in the top right corner of every page?
Feedburner sends the posts via email, right? I have avoided that because I think I’d rather people not read the site via email. That seems to discourage actually visiting the site (which means less likely to post comments, read other topics, etc.)
Thanks Nyx!
Have you gone back and read your today.com agreement carefully? It actually says you aren’t allowed to reproduce the content elsewhere, and that you basically gave Today.com exclusive rights to its publishing. I think technically they can send a cease and desist letter and even try to force you to legally take down the duplicate content. Not saying they will, or that it’s worth their time, but you may want to re-read what you agreed to over there very carefully.
Yes. But Today.com unilaterally changed the terms without me agreeing to it. The forced single theme, the refusal to pay for posts that link to my Bright Hub articles, and a few other things. They already materially breached the contract.
grande remos de ramotes y bancias con razibe araclando. barespimo a vartos y panarg amegimo con cemelina obatersol!