Web Visits vs NATO Member Countries

I wanted to show the relative increase in site visitors this year. So I picked year to date numbers compared to the same time interval last year. I also wanted to show a few random countries, so I used NATO Member Countries.

Currently March numbers are the highest ever of any other month, and there are still two days left. The first day of next month I'll show the standard bar graph of visitor status, or what ever I put up. But I wanted to detail something different before hand, another view of some of the data.


The over-all site is up about 20% over last year; however some of the countries listed below may show a higher or lower increase. None of the countries listed had a decrease in visitors to the web site [Engineering Data].


Now none of the [22] new pages generated this year are getting any web visits [yet]. So the increase in site visitors must be due to new pages added last year, or additions made to existing pages already residing on the web site. Maybe a few posts back I detailed how poorly the new page additions were doing.

NATO member states:
Albania;  27% increase
Belgium; 16% increase
Bulgaria; 35% increase
Canada;  22% increase
Croatia;  57% increase
Czech Rep;  32% increase
Denmark;  11% increase
Estonia;  52% increase
France;  24% increase
Germany;  24% increase
Greece;  25% increase
Hungary;  15% increase
Iceland;  6% increase
Italy;  19% increase
Latvia;  47% increase
Lithuania;  45% increase
Luxembourg;  3% increase
Netherlands;  7% increase
Norway;  27% increase
Poland;  17% increase
Portugal;  31% increase
Romania;  27% increase
Slovakia;  55% increase
Slovenia;  42% increase
Spain;  13% increase
Turkey;  17% increase
United Kingdom;  17% increase
United States;  11% increase

Now to be fair there have been some countries that show a decrease in site visits; for example, the 1 hit from the Vatican City did not return again this year. ~ this may appear to be a long posting, but it's just the list. I guess I forgot NATO started letting the eastern-block countries in for membership.

Just for the record, I just posted a comment to a blog post regarding Alexa data. Alexa indicates 11.1% of my site traffic is from Iran, while Google Analytics [site counter] indicates 0.43%. The data above is from Google Analytics, not some third party site.
Graphic; Flight of a NATO AWACS and three F16 fighters. Open Source. [public domain].
Graphic; Map of NATO countries and EU members. Open Source. [public domain].

Picasa Web Albums

So it would appear that Google's Picasa Web Albums is off-line, and I'm not really sure how long they've been down. The web site [Engineering Portal]  uses a lot of grapics and pic files, but not all of them are local to my server. I off-load some of them to Picasa to keep the server bandwidth down, which runs around 13G Bytes a month. Right, if someone else is serving the picture files then my bandwidth is not effected.

It's hard to say how many pic files reside on my server, as they could still reside in one of my directories but not used any more. So the count is an estimate but it would appear there are 687 picture files local to my server [give or a take]. Picasa on the other hand is serving another 919 graphic files [or not]. Because it appears that currently there are over 900 pic files not showing up on the web site.

So is it a good idea to up-load your files to another server? Well if your doing it to shows friends, sure. But what about if your trying to run a business? I guess I don't have an answer, but I am saving on my bandwidth. It's not saving me any money because my bandwidth limit is much higher than 13GB. What I am saving, or enhancing, is page load-time [I hope]. If the page is downloaded from my server and a pic file is downloaded from Picaca the visitor should see the page render faster. Or what if the files were on my server, what would be the bandwidth then?
Maybe a standard graphic file is 10 to 20K, and there are over 360,000 page views a month [over 380,000 page views this month]. That seems like a lot of down-loading [saved]......

So I see that the graphics are down in blogger as well [this blog]. I guess that makes sense because Google stores the blog graphics in Picasa too. I was going to attach a graphic showing server bandwidth vs page views, so that will have to wait. I'll add a link to this posing as a comment a bit later [SEO Techniques]. And it seems like just a few days ago the web site was off-line for a few hours too.

Oh, SEO stuff; the website link 'Engineering Portal' points to the normal site, I'm just using a different term to describe it ~ for the search engines. To try and insure the words are assigned to my home page , or related to...

Site has been assigned special crawl rate settings

So I just checked Google Web Master Tools to see how the site was doing [looking for any issues]. Plus I had just up-loaded a new xml sitemap. The last update of the xml site-map was in December, so this new one covers the 20 odd pages added in the last few months.

Anyway, because the site was off-line for a few hours the other day, I checked the crawl rate. I no longer have the option of changing the Google crawl rate [for Googlebot]. Instead of a crawl faster or crawl slower selection I see this message;
Your site has been assigned special crawl rate settings. You will not be able to change the crawl rate.

Under the Crawl errors page I don't see any issues. There are 16 pages not found, but those are all mis-spelled page addresses from other web sites [incoming links], which I can't do any thing about. So I check how GoogleBot is crawling the Engineering web site, all looks well. In fact it seems that over the last three years around 500 pages are crawled per day. Here is the site crawl rate history over the last few years [Engineering Blog with a search term of Crawl]. So what is the deal and what does Special Crawl Rate mean?

I tried a Google web search for the terms 'assigned special crawl rate' and I get a Google News group with dozens of people asking the same thing. Well News-Groups are not that great a place to get information, only because so many people post a reply, just to post with out ever answering the question. Some people said it was for large sites, others replied that they had a small site. Then people would say that's why 1000's of their pages are not indexed [which is different all together].

So I can't answer the question of why your site has been assigned a special crawl rate, because I don't know why my site received it. But I can say that at least for my site, there has been no change in the crawl rate ~ all the way back to 2007. Click the crawl rate graphic for a larger image for year-to-date crawl rates.

I could add to that and say my site does not even require a sitemap, any new page gets spidered with in about a month. Of course this blog gets spidered today, remember blogger is owned by Google. Oh if I didn't already say Google indicates 1,653 urls submitted in the xml sitemap, with 1,322 urls indexed.

Attached graphic; Google Crawl Rate for January 2010 to March 2010.

The Web Site is Off-Line

The web site [Engineering Electronics] is down for about an hour now and I can't get any work done, so I figured I would go ahead and get a blog post in. The web site does not go down that often, but I'm never happy when it does. I don't make any money when the site is off line and I could always be losing new visitors ~ not good.

I should call, but I'm sure they will just say; we know its off-line and we're working on it. A few years back I did call and complained after the site was down most of a day. I remember asking how they arrive at their up-time number ~ You know the 99.999% on-line guarantee [that number]. I don't remember getting a response to my question, and the guarantee is useless as well. You have to go into your site stats and prove to the hosting company the site was off-line ~ like they don't already know. If I had more confidence in my cable connection I'd get my own server and do the hosting myself.

Anyway I've added a few new pages over the last week, keeping the site-map updated each time. The site is still doing better than last year, at around a 20% increase in site visits. Pageviews on the other hand are only around 15% higher, but there still higher. This same period last year the site had 922,867 page-views, while this year the site has received 1,063,542 page views. Really the pages-per-visit are down 4%, but because of the increase in traffic the other numbers are still up.

Wait a minute, a page just opened up, it may be trying to come back on line? Maybe I lost about 500 web visits, depending on how long it was really off-line. When the stats come in at 5:30 am I would guess I will not be seeing a 10,000  visit day [which is almost the norm now].....

Sitemap Generation

I updated the html sitemap for interfacebus.com. This is the first update since the interfacebus-sitemap was up-loaded on 12/19/09. So I added in the last 22 web pages generated over the last few months, and removed a few more duplicate entries left over from when the page was generated.

I also went ahead and ran Xenu tonight to check for bad links. Looks like we have 99.17% good links out of 7,396 links. Seems I my have had about 10 bad links listed [which I have already fixed], I assume the other web sites will come back on line in a few hours ~ which is when I'll recheck them.

I'll go ahead and run the xml site-map generator over the week end. So the 22 odd new pages get included in that file and I can re-upload that file to Google. The last time the xml sitemap was generated was around 12/19/09 too.

Graphic; KC-135 Stratotanker Cockpit Instrument Panel [USAF Tanker].

PageViews performance

Yep I went out and looked at the performance of the new pages that have been generated so far this year. In most cases the page views are very low, maybe one or two a day or no views at all.

I opened three or four of the different pages and added a bit more text when possible. But a number of these pages were generated based on a graphic. So either the text is already embedded in the picture or the graphic doesn't really require any additional text. So I'm kind of stuck, the pages are un-fixable  there's really nothing wrong with them. Except for the fact that the page bring in zero traffic.

Now I know I need text on a page to bring in traffic from the search engines. It's standard Search Engine Optimization [SEO] stuff, day one. But these pages were generated around a graphic file, little text required. Maybe I should stop generating a new page just because I have a picture file I want to use. Still I'm not even getting hits from people already on the site [engineering], nor am I getting any traffic from people doing an image search.

The question is what to do? Some of these pages were generated 3 months ago and have only seen a dozen hits.
1. Well I added some additional text to a few of the pages.
2. I also commented on a few of the Blog pages that added them. I always comment on my own postings, to indicate updates or changes in the original posting. Of course the comment enhances the blog page, because more text is added. Remember a blog post is also a web page.
3. Then there is this blog posting, with links to the pages that need help.

Now I talked about this same issue last December [New Page Generation and Page Views], only how new pages did over the entire year. Normally I never care about a page until it's at least 3 months old, which some of these are. But these page views are so low there's just no getting around the fact that they most have some kind of issue.

Panel Mount LED. Holds a graphic of a few LEDs. Added 1/7/10, zero page rank
Capacitor Networks. Graphics and a bit of text. Added 1/15/10, zero page rank
Via Stubs in PCBs. Definition of a Via Stub. Added 1/17/10, zero page rank
Jumper Headers. Holds a graphic of some jumpers. Added 12/31/09, zero page rank
These pages have only received between a dozen and 2 dozen page views so far, subtract a few because of me. Oh and page rank doesn't mean any thing, but it wouldn't hurt if they get one soon. Of course there are more pages in the same boat, but why fill the blog post with a bunch of page links.

Why are my earnings low

I figured it's been more than a week so it's time for a posting. I only wish I had a topic.
But when in doubt post how the page views are doing.

What I find interesting is that page views are up over the last six months, both unique visitors and total visitors. In fact not only are page views higher on a per month basis, but over the last several months they are the highest numbers ever for any month. However the problem is that earnings for the site are stable, flat, or altogether boring..... Sure I've seen revenue increases for a day or a week, but nothing long term. I have not seen a steady increase in earnings which would track with the increase in visits.

Yea I could move ads or change ad formats, which I do. But I'm really always working on new content, and when I do move an ad it's to make the page look better and not to make more money.

The attached graph shows total visitors per month, which accounts for unique visitors and re-counts them if they return. So if a person visits the site they become a unique visitor. If that person returns during the same month that visit gets counted again as another visit [per the graph]. Each time a person visits the site and views a page, that gets counted as a page view. Normally people will view more than one page when they visit. So the number of visitors will be less because that would account for less pages that might be seen. So you visit the site [unique visitor], you come back and your a re-counted visitor, and every page is counted as a page view. Then the chart shows a number higher than unique visits, but lower total page views.

err, I was watching Donnie Darko while typing, so forgive the typo's.