Page Bounce Rate

Bounce Rate
The Bounce Rate is still not improving on the web site, and I've been working to improve or reduce the bounce rate all year. From the Google help page the definition is; “Bounce rate is the percentage of single-page visits or visits in which the person left your site from the entrance (landing) page.”. Or to say it another way, a visitor only sees one page out of the entire site and then chicks away to another website.

Now in some cases just hitting one page would be fine; say they found the site via a Google search for SCSI Cable Assemblies, and visited that particular page and clicked away. Well they found the vendor they were looking for and went out to read the online-paper. But at the same point I do expect some amount of people to check out more then one page per visit. Of course this is true, many hits result in multi-page visits. In fact some sub sections of the site always see visits that result in many page views per visit.

Now the down side of having a poor bounce rate is that it's a bit hard to correct. The only recourse I have is to add related links to a page with a high bounce rate and hope that one of those links are clicked. Some pages lend them selves to handle related page-to-page links while other pages do not, so it's hit or miss. Over the last nine months I've been trying to add related links to pages that had a high bounce rate.

Of course I could always start to write a multi-page articles and include a 'next page' link at the bottom of each page. Unfortunately much of the site is really not set up as a group of technical articles which span many pages.

Here is a sample of four pages that seem to have an increased Bounce Rate over this year.

Table of American Wire Gauge.
Description of the DVI interface.
Description of the Firewire Bus.
Cable insulation color coding.

Related blog posts;
SEO Tactics and Visits from Image Searches [6/22/09]
How to decrease Bounce Rate [2/13/09]

Photo; Maximum Thermal Impedance of a 2N5003.
Ref; How to Derate a 2N5003 Transistor.

Office Live and their Free Web Services

I finally logged back into my officelive account after 7 months of not checking it. I stopped logging in after Microsoft disallowed any other browser but MS Explorer from accessing the account. Of course I hadn't had any updates either, but I would have like to see the site stats regardless.

Any way Microsoft had said you would get a free web site, free hosting, and a free domain name. Now they indicate a policy change and they will no longer pay for the domain name; the interfacebus.net domain name expires April of next year.

The question is do I want this site, or is the site even making any money for interfacebus.com?
The web site really only has about a dozen pages


What I don't like about Officelive:
I can't run Google ads.
I can't login with out using MS Explorer.
The web tools aren't that great.

What I like about the web site:
It locks down the interfacebus.net domain name.
The site has a Page-Rank of 3
The site has sent 944 visitors to interfacebus.com [over 3 years]
---- Serialphy.com has only referred 247 in the last year.
---- google-pages [defunct] referred 2,597 visits over the last 3 years.
---- google sites has sent in 499 in just the last three months.
---- google knols has sent in 783 visitors in just a year and a half.
The site has been online for 3 years [06/06] and has history.
---- The incoming referred visitors view more pages and stay on the site longer
The site allows interfacebus to show up twice on a google search [cause it's a different site]

What is it just $10 a year anyway for a domain name, did I make that from those 900 visitors? It is free advertising [or was], but people posting about my web site in on-line forums sent in 37,127 visitors over the last 3 years! now that's free advertising......

The last related posting regarding interfacebus.net was 4/08 Usage Stats.

Web Site Status

Its be a month without blogging, so time to generate an input.

Web visits are up this month by several hundred, but I think it's just because its seasonal. Nominal hits are running around 8,700 visits a day.

Seems like I just checked for bad links a few weeks ago. The sitemap was also updated over the last few weeks, but the system will not let me back in to make any more changes [not sure way?]...

Added a new page to the Google site covering Capacitor frequency operation. From the "What's new" blog it appears that about one new page a week is added to the main site.

I also notice that one of the interface bus pages has only received 21 page visits since Jan 08. However it may just be that the page covering the Medical Information Bus only has a few sentences of text.

No Google Page Ranking

So I made note of a few pages that did not seem to have a page ranking from Google. Of course this would not be the first posting on this particular topic, but some how it's back at the top of the list. Now I do realize that in some cases the page rank my take a moment to show, I don't always wait that long, but it would seem that these pages lack a page rank;

Definition of Solderless Terminals.
Manufacturers of Plastic Molds.
Equipment Caster Manufacturers.
Manufacturers that produce Equipment Leveling Products.
Definition of Alligator Clips.
Manufacturers that produce Equipment Anti-Vibration Products.

Not sure why I'm listing these few pages, there are many other pages with out a page rank from Google. Oh, I can tell because I run the Google Tool bar which shows a page rank bar.

Browser Compatibility

I just came across one of my pages that does not display correctly in Internet Explorer, I thought those days were over. Of course I might have a coding error on the page. I'm currently using IE 8.

However the page does render correctly in Mozillz Firefox [version 3.5.2] and Google Chrome [version 2.0.172.39]. I use all three broswers; Firefox, Chrome and IE on every power-up.

Unlike years ago I no longer browser check my pages so I don't run older program versions. I also don't run other programs like Safari or Netscape or any others. Oh, the page does display correctly in my HTML editor also.

So the page just shows Intel Processor Release Dates. Not sure why I ever added it, but I see no reason to remove. it

2009 Visitor Data from Google Analytics:
Internet Explorer = 56% [Versions; ver 7.0 = 51%, ver 6.0 = 38%, ver 8.0 = 10%]
Firefox = 34%
Chrome = 3%
Opera = 2.6%
Safari = 2.35%
Mozilla = 0.88%
SeaMonkey = 0.12%
err, that page was viewed 1,075 times this year

Analytic data is in

So it's a new month and I have the data from last month ready to post. I'm unimpressed, the data looks about normal. I still see no improvement, but July may be a slow month.


Two points of note;
1. Page views are up even as Page visits are down (that's good)
2. Server Bandwidth is on the increase (not good)


Server Bandwidth:
The lowest curve is server bandwidth and does not relate to the other numbers on the chart. The bandwidth is hovering around 100,000 [on the chart] but really equates to 10GB as the numbers were changed to fit the graph.

Unique Visits:
Are visits from a computer within a month, but any one computer is only counted one time. If any one computer returns for a second visit it's counted by the Visits curve.

Visits:
A site visit is registered each time a person visits the site within a month and each time the person returns to the site. Site Visits should always be equal to or greater than Unique Visits.

Page Views:
Are the number of pages a person views per month, regardless of how many times the visitor returns to the web site. Page Views should always be equal to or greater than Site Visits. Page views are really the only data point that is falling. Page Views is related to Bounce Rate, which is the percentage a person visits one page and then leaves the site.

Analytics Data:
Visits = 180,280
Pageviews = 331,973
Pages/Visit - 1.84
New Visits = 77.59%
Bounce Rate = 72.38

Document Copyright Issues

I was doing a little research the other day looking up some data to support the chassis design section of the web site.

So I pull up this Handbook from the DOE and I'm speed reading, scrolling through the pages really quick. Stopping for a moment as I see some data on equipment rack grounding I like, other wise I keep scrolling.

I scroll past a table with a blue background, and I stop ~ all the tables on my web site once had blue back grounds. It's an Ampacity table for copper wire. Just above the table is data relating to derating wire bundles, just like my site.

Scrolling to the next page I see another table for chassis wire color coding, again copied from me. Even the text above the tables has been lifted. Even a disclaimer I used about not covering Military color coding is used.. The next 5 tables, with text, all from my site.

Now to be fair the data used in the tables covering color coding by voltage and TFE wire Ampacity were both derived from some other DOD standard. However there are two differences here; first any data derived from a military specification did not have a copyright, and second I didn't copy their table I retyped and reformatted the facts.

So what is the issue here?
a. First the US Government does not copyright their information. So if I copy data from a military standard I'm safe, it's free to use.
b. Second, I do copyright my data and it is not free to use. Also my site is not listed in the References section of the document, so I received no credit for the copied data.
c. Third, Once my data was put into that government handbook I lost my copyright because US Gov documents have no copyright ~ so now anyone can re-copy it.
d. Finally, Did my tax dollars pay someone to copy data from my site ~ it's a double hit. I paid someone to undermine my website.
e. Guess what, this posting on site visits (6/20/09) noted a 50% reduction in visits to the page that lost the data [Wire Insulation Color Coding]. All the text and tables that were copied originated from that page.

Notes;
1. For a number of years many tables on the web site had blue back grounds, but a few years ago all the tables were changed to a clear background. Changing the background color was one of a number of changes I made to reduce the bandwidth of the site. A clear background does not require any HTML code, while a colored background requires bgcolor=xxxx (what ever).
2. In some cases the department seal used by some agencies do have restrictions on use. I'm not sure if I can display the DOE seal or not, I know NASA does not like it.
3. The chassis design section covers a few dozen pages and addresses the issues that may come up while designing an equipment chassis, with Equipment Rack data..
4. I will be using data from this handbook, I have already posted a graphic for an equipment rack ~ again there is not copyright covering this DOE Handbook.

Comparing Visits from Different Years

One of the reports from Google Analytics is an overview of visitors from any two dates that are of interest. You can also compare any two sets of date ranges. In this case the graphic to the left compares 1-1-08 to 7-22-08 vs. 1-1-09 to 7-22-09. The graph points [dots] are per week, but you can show data per day or per month. Click the image for a larger view of the data.

Notice that the graph lines appear almost identical. However the data indicates there has been a -0.56% increase visitors from this year to last, or around a decrease of 7000 visitors. That's less than one day worth of visitors, so maybe the site went down a few hours more this year than last.

Not much to worry about until I scroll down the report and review the data on a per page basis. That's when the data starts to look troubling. Here is a sampling of a few of the pages that are in decline, ignoring the few pages that showed an increase in visits.

CANbus -4.24% in visitors.
USB Interface -5.21% in visitors.
interfacebus.com [home page] -15.68% in visitors.
PCIexpress Interface -37.28% in visitors.
RS422 Interface -5.16% in visitors.
SerialATA Interface -7.19% in visitors.

Now these are not buses that are in decline, so there is no reason for these pages to see any decrease. Unlike the RS232 bus that is being left off newer computers; that page also showed a -12.25% decline, but I can deal with that.

So what is the deal with a graph that shows no real decrease, but many pages that seem to be in decline. Well when you check the blog listing new engineering pages, you'll see that over a hundred new pages have been added over the same time frame. So the new pages are leveling out this year even as a number of pages are seeing a reduced number of hits.

Hmm, I happen to be looking for the VME64x pin out today, my page came up first in a Google search but I decided to select the next guys page. Sure enough there's my text, plus a link back to me ~ stay off my site. Guess it's time to start looking at some of these other pages to see what's finding its way onto other websites.

Most of these guys running hardware or engineering sites aren't engineers at all, you can kind of tell by what they copy.

The point here is always spend some time searching the Internet looking for your work. I found a guy a few years back who had copied my PCIe page [and a dozen others], but I had just written the page. It had taken several hours to generate the different pin out tables in HTML, and he grabbed them in a matter of minutes.... Better stop now or I'll start naming names. Oh had two typo's I found weeks later, to bad he missed garbing the up-dates.

Knol is just not working for me

Well maybe Knol is working or maybe it's not. I have about 10 different Knols published of varying lengths, with different generation dates. Some Knols have been out there for months while others were just published, so some have more page views than others for that reason.

The ten Knols out there have been viewed 11,460 times over the last year. Now that number is not so bad for ten random pages on the internet, but there's a bigger issue. Those 11,000 page views have only sent 595 visitors to interfacebus.com, the site that really counts [link is not the main page].

Those incoming visitors have a 67% bounce rate, or 67% of the incoming people only check one page before leaving the site. So for every 19 Knol page views I get one page view at interfacebus.com ~ that doesn't sound that bad, put like that. But only 30% of those new people coming in were interested in the site. err only 178 people had any interest in the main site; now that sounds low.....

I consider the Knols just another web site:
1. Another external site that points to interfacebus
2. Another way to show up in the Search Engine Results [SERP]
----- two unrelated sites may show up on the same page result.
3. The Knols point to a number of my pages, other than the home page
4. The Knols push Page Rank to the pages being pointed to.
5. Another way for new people to find my site.

The dots [points] on the attached graphic are per week for the data range indicated. The data is from Google Analytics, for Referral sources, filtered to show only incoming hits from knol.google.com.

I don't track the amount of time spent working a page, so I can't say if it was worth the effort to work with Knol. However it takes months to get a page going after the Search Engine delays are accounted for.

FYI; the best Knol relates to a general description of Computer Buses, with 3,442 page views and a page rank of 3.

What ever; most of the Knols are to short, so I need to keep spending more time working them. Maybe someday I'll get some visitors from the Knol pages.......

[Text Removed 6-28-2010]

Why do Web Stat Counters Differ

So I was looking at the Manufacturers listing section again, just to see how that section was doing. Looks like there are 95 individual pages that make up the manufacturers section. There are 10 pages that make up the listing of companies that start with the letter 'A', as an example.

The graphic shows two examples of counters that might track incoming visitors, both counters represent page views.

The top counter is from Google Adsense and the bottom counts represents page views from Google Analytics. Both counters require JAVA Script to be enabled in the browser.

But why are the counters so different, there both from Google? The Adsense counter seems to be counting at a higher rate than the Analytics counter. Note the scales differ between each counter.
Click the graphic for a larger image.

Pages with the least amount of visitors;
Component Vendors, 'Us'.
IC Vendors, 'Ap'.
Equipment Manufacturers, 'Go'.
IC Manufacturers, 'Gen'.
These are the bottom 4, but it could be these page were only generated last year and may not be as old as some of the other pages.....

Links from an External Page

One of the data points AWSTATS provides is a listing of Links from External Pages.
AWSTATS is the server side counter used by interfacebus.com.
With the start of the new month the listing is small and still workable. Scrolling down the list the column indicating page visits goes blank, while still indicating hits to the site.

That normally means that another site is directly linking to graphic files on my server [site]. The site is using my graphics from my server. The graphic wasn't copied, it's being used directly from my server ~ using up my bandwidth. Not really sure if I like that better than just taking a copy of my picture file.

So I checked a few of the sites using the largest bandwidth [most hits] and visit the other web site. Once I find the graphic file their linking to, I go back to my server change the name of the pic file and up-date my pages so that they to point to the new file name. I save bandwidth and they end up with a broken link. Some times I'll leave the old file name valid but change the pic file to a graphic of my site address :)

Both sites I check were forums, which normally don't allow people to upload graphics. Web sites normally just take the graphics out-right.

The attached graphic is an example forum site that had copied one of my pic files. Some time last year I changed the file name and had a graphic of my site name up-loaded......

Alexa Demographics

Alexa is one of many web sites that collects data on web site visits, but with Alexa you have to run their tool bar. With out the tool bar they don't collect any data.

So they only gather data from a certain group of people, and not from every one who might visits a site. Because of this I've never worried about the over all stats they display because I know it's only from a small segment of the population. However at the same time, many people also think the opposite.

Any way here is a partial data chart from Alexa for interfacebus.com.

The green represent above average visits from a group, while red represents below average visits. So the web site brings in older male visitors that are highly educated while they are at work.

Click on the image for a larger view of the pic.

Start a Blog to Gain Site Visitors

I've been working this Blog for 3 and a half years now, starting in Nov 2005. Pretty much 3/4 web site topics with the rest being engineering topics.

I started a second blog in Oct 2007 to cover page additions to interfacebus.com. In most cases I list what ever new pages are added to the site, but I'm sure I miss a few now and again.

The attached graph shows the combined visits to both blogs. The large spike at the center of the chart shows when the second blog was started [spikes are per day].

Using Google Analytics [which was started mid 2006] shows this Blog referred 3,045 people to interfacebus [46.21% blog traffic]. While the 'What's new Blog' sent over 2,605 referrals [39.53% blog traffic]. And that's with the second blog starting a year later. In fact just looking at this year, the 'What's new blog' referred 812 visits, while this blog sent over another 531 visits.

Seems like a good reason to start a blog

Top Web Site Content

Here is how the site is doing, Page Views and number of pages receiving those page views. Seems like most of the site is receiving less than 1000 page views so far this year.

Maybe it's time to work more on adding to pages already on the site and not so much into adding new pages. At any given time there are always 50 plus pages waiting on a page rank. So it's understandable to have some number of pages with no page views, but these number are to high.

70,000 to 79,000: 1 page
60,000 to 69,000: 0 pages
50,000 to 59,000: 1 page
40,000 to 49,000: 1 page
30,000 to 39,000: 2 pages
20,000 to 29,000: 4 pages
10,000 to 19,000: 18 pages
1,000 to 9,000: 340 pages
100 to 900: 809 pages
1 to 99: 640 pages [estimate]

Many pages in my list receiving below around 10 hits, are 404 pages. Or pages that were visited but don't really exist. They are just misspelled page addresses, so that 640 figure is a bit high.

Last years post on the same topic; Page views.

Twenty of the pages receiving below 10 visits were Transistor Derating Curves, a few are listed below. Another dozen or so just receiving between 10 to 20 visits. Guess that section of pages is never going to do so well.... But listing some of them here provides an external page link, and they were just up-dated.

Low visits;
2N4150 Derating. 2N5581 Derating Curve.
How to derate a 2N6762. 2N6306 Power Rating.
2N4033 Power Data. 2N6300 Power Derating Curve.
2N5002 Derating Guideline. 2N2904A Derating Graph.

Static Generation. No page text
Relay Derating Rules. Not sure what is wrong here
Cable Retracter Arms. New page
Fuse Holder Notes.
Power Supply Notes.

SEO Tactics and Visits from Image Searches

One sure way of getting new site visitor is from image searches. Just like receiving incoming visitors from a text based search, images can bring in new visitors. Plus images go along way to adding support to the text it's related to on the page.

The attached graphic shows weekly page visits from people using an image search, via a search engine. The data is from Google Analytics; Traffic Sources, Referring Sites, Filter 'image'.

So over the last three years there have been 43,437 visits to interfacebus.com via an image search. Now 43,000 site visits is not a very big number, and it's less than what the site gets in a single week.
More importantly the data indicates that 86.37% of the incoming hits were from new visitors. So 37,000 new people found my site who may not have otherwise ever found it, that's called free advertising.
Now the Bounce rate was only 67.77%, so 33% of the visitors jumped to more than one page on the site. I can't tell how many people book-marked the address or came back again, but it must be some percentage.

New pictures are being added to the site all the time. All images also always come with an html alt tag and title tag to help the search engine determine what the picture relates to. The picture file name is always descriptive, and most site graphics have a visible caption.

In fact the section on Definition of Resistor Terms was up-dated over the weekend with a few more graphics. At the same time any missing pic captions were added.

How to Increase Site Visits:
Just keep adding graphics to gain more visitors, but not so many that they slow down loading in the page. Keep in mind that there is a time lag between when a pic file is added and when the search engine finds it.

This blog brings in 100 visits a month, 61% new visits at a 61% Bounce Rate.

SEO: Search Engine Optimization

Related post from last year; SEO and Hits from Image Referrals
Graphic; Weekly hits from image searches.

I Need More Visitors

Visitors to interfacebus.com have been flat for years. I add new pages all the time, and of course I up-date and enhance existing pages at an even faster rate [Engineering Page Additions]. What ever I do to the web site, it seems to make no difference.

Of course some of the issues that effect the website are just out of my control. A third of the website is geared toward Computer Buses. Well as time moves on more and more of those PC Buses go obsolete. For example the PCI Express bus replaced both the PCI Bus and the AGP Bus, resulting in 5 pages replacing 8 pages [when pinout tables are counted].

Many new pages added are small in size and it takes time to work them while also doing routine maintenance to the website.

----- RoHS Definition [Added in 2006, no Page Rank, and only viewed 347 times]

Sometimes a page might seem like a good idea, but I never get around to working that particular issue.

----- PON Acronyms [Added in 2007, Page Rank 2, only viewed 263 times]

Maybe I start a page because I generate a new graphic and think it will support another page.

----- Compliant Pin Description [Added in 2008, Page Rank 2, only viewed 230 times]

Adding new pages does not guarantee visitors, as they still have to compete with preexisting pages on the web.

----- Manufacturers of Waveguide Gaskets [Added in 2009, no Page Rank, only viewed 71 times]

New pages also need three months before they receive a page rank from Google, if they ever get one at all. A Page Rank helps the page show up on page one of the search results.

Of course I have no control how my pages show up in the search results. The rise and fall based on an algorithm running on some computer. This page lost 50% of its visits in mid 2008 and stayed there.

----- Wire Insulation Color Codes [Added pre 2006, Page Rank 2]

FYI

The attached graphic is from Google Trends showing the Internet search history for the term AGP. Click the graphic for a larger image. The AGP interface [Accelerated Graphics Port] is the obsolete PC motherboard video bus which was replaced by the PCI Express [PCIe] bus.

Website Site Map

I finally got around to up-loading the latest site map that I generated last month; Engineering Sitemap. I did notice that the previous version at the same location was never saved so I'm not really sure if it could have been found on the internet. The previous up-load date was 8/1/08 and the page address has no page rank even after 10 months on the internet...

Seems to be there now. But the pages out under Google Sites only bring in 10 visits/month to the main Engineering Site ~ which is not good.

Here are a few pages that are generating the least amount of pages views this year [in the single digits]:

BJT Multivibrator Definitions.

2N6758 Derating Graph.

2N6762 Derating Graph.

2N6766 T1 Package Derating Graph.

2N5002 Derating Graph.

Electrostatic Volatage Definition.

Cable Retractor Definition.

High Speed Serial Trace Specification.

How To Design a Chassis, Index.

Broadband over Power Line.

Rackmount Computer Vendors.

Computer Publications.

I'm sure there are dozens if not hundreds more that could be listed, but many of these are new pages.

Zenu Link Checking

I ran Zenu on the web site today to check for bad links. To my surprise I found over a dozen bad links, and I have yet to finish checking all the links from the report.

The report from Zenu provides dozens of so call bad links, but many are just sites that just don't answer fast enough or sites that don't allow robots to check them. In either case I have to hand check all those links. The report indicated 6496 URL links that were ok, or 98% of the links. Some 27 links were reported as 'Bad', or 0.4%. However in some cases a bad link may reside on more than one page, so I've uploaded 18 pages to correct the bad links.

In addition to correcting a few bad links I also fixed a few re-directs, so the link points to the new page with out having the browser do the redirect. I did notice that many of my links that pointed to many internal Intel pages were no longer working; I ended up deleting those links.

Never really understand why a web master would cause a link to go bad. I just don't see how that helps a web site. In any case Intel just lost a few incoming links. The section of the web site with the largest number of bad links was Interface Bus Descriptions. Followed by the section covering Electronic Component Manufacturers.

Zenu also generates a sitemap so over the week end I'll be uploading a new site map to cover all the new pages that have been added to the web site over the last few months.

The correct name for Zenu is Zenu Link Sleuth and of 4/25/09 they have a new version of the program for download [version 1.3c].

The attached graphic is produced from Google Analytics and has nothing to do with Zenu. Click on the pic file for a larger image.

Web Site StatCounter

Here is the latest webStats for interfacebus.com. You'll note that there has been a bit of an improvement over the last few months.

Visits are up over the last year, that includes Unique visits and Total Visits. Normally the first of the year shows an increase in site visits, or the increase could be due to work done to the web site during the end of last year.

The increase in Page Visits tells me that the site Bounce Rate is decreasing. Which means that people are checking out more pages per visits ~ which is always a good thing.

However; over the last 3 and a half years these lines are flat ~ after 3 years of work.........

Zero Google Page Rank for Component Vendors

There are a number of distinct sections for topics on the web site. One section just lists manufacturers or vendors in alphabetic order. Because it's a section consisting of about 100 pages, I track it.

Back in June of 2008 I posted a listing of all the pages with in the section that had a zero Google Page Rank: Page Rank and Listing of Manufacturers. Guess I'm checking again.... I really see no improvement in the component pages yet.
Page hits have fallen by 50% from Jan. 2007. But the Bounce rate as decreased by 50% as well [which is a good think]. Of course the 'A' components page gets the most hits, followed by the page that covers 'D' vendors, and so on.

Component Manufacturers with no Page Rank:
Equipment Manufacturers, Ae [A2].
Equipment Manufacturers, Amd [A4].
Equipment Manufacturers, Ap [Ap].
Equipment Manufacturers, Ar [A6].
Equipment Manufacturers, Asq [A7].
Equipment Manufacturers, Av [A8].
Equipment Manufacturers, Be [Be].
Equipment Manufacturers, Bi [B1].
Equipment Manufacturers, Bl [Bl].
Equipment Manufacturers, Br [B2].
Equipment Manufacturers, Cm [C3].
Equipment Manufacturers, Con [C4].
Equipment Manufacturers, Cp [C5].
Equipment Manufacturers, Dem [D1].
Equipment Manufacturers, E.
Equipment Manufacturers, Ec [Ec].
Equipment Manufacturers, El [E1].
Equipment Manufacturers, Em [E2].
Equipment Manufacturers, Ev [E4].
Equipment Manufacturers, Em [F1].
Equipment Manufacturers, Ga [G].
Equipment Manufacturers, Ge [Gen].
Equipment Manufacturers, Gi [G1].

I stop checking all but the main page for each letter. But I don't see any rank for any of these pages listed below.

Equipment Manufacturers, H.
Equipment Manufacturers, J.
Equipment Manufacturers, K.
Equipment Manufacturers, L.
Equipment Manufacturers, N.
Equipment Manufacturers, O.
Equipment Manufacturers, P.
Equipment Manufacturers, Q.
Equipment Manufacturers, R.
Equipment Manufacturers, S.
Equipment Manufacturers, U.
Equipment Manufacturers, V.
Equipment Manufacturers, X.
Equipment Manufacturers, Y.
Equipment Manufacturers, Z.

So many of these pages were just updated. So any bad links have been removed and replaced with just a text listing. I've also been adding text to indicate the date a company was acquired by another manufacturer. Why are these pages lacking any page ranking.

So this listing will provide yet another link to the pages that require a ranking. More external links mean a page rank? Maybe the number of links on each page are bleeding page rank, but what would be the point with out the links.

Any way, the updates over the last few months have not been picked up by any search engine yet.
-----------------------------

How to decrease Bounce Rate

So how do you reduce Bounce Rate, or the rate at which a person only visits one page of a web site and then jumps away to another site. Seems like I've been looking at this awhile now, with some page updates devoted to reducing Bounce Rate. I even see a blog posting from last May concerning Bounce Rate.

Yet I don't see any improvement. However there has been a slight improvement in a few sections of the web site;
Dictionary of Resistor Terms.
Component Derating.
But no changes in other sections.

Of course it's a bit hard to track individual pages, because there are so many. I could improve one page yet the bounce rate on another page decreases for some random reason.
Bounce Rate is important, but only because I see a steady decrease in page views, but no decrease in site visits. Which means the same amount of people visits the site, but over the last few years click to less pages per visit.

New Pages and the result [Title, Date added, Bounce Rate]
Diode Terms, 11/3/07, Bounce rate GOOD [80% last year to 60%]
Minimum Annular Ring Definition, 11/4/07, Poor, [75% steady]
Dictionary of Capacitor Terms, 11/17/07, Average, [60% steady]
Multi-Colored LEDs, 11/20/07, Average [60% falling]
CEC Interface, 11/29/07, Poor [80% rising]
MicroUSB, 11/28/07, Poor, [80% rising]

More Page Views equals a low Bounce Rate. Web Site; Personal Computer Signal Assignments.

Number of Daily Visits

Looks like there is an increase in Daily Visits to the site. January had on average about 8,000 total visits per day, with a few days having around 8,300 visits [as reported by AWSTATS].

This week the visits have grown to around 8,500 visits a-day, or up about 500 per day.

There is no way to tell why the site sees an increase, but it could be due to what ever work was added to the site back in December. Of course there is also no way to tell how long the increase will last.

The important points in the graphic are Number of Visits and Pages. Web Site; PC Bus Pinouts.

Hits for the 7th are no yet in the report. On average from Jan the highest hits come in on Tuesday and Wednesday. Monday is a close third after Tuesday. Visits start to fall off on Thursday, Friday and Saturday. Slowing rebounding on Sunday, I assume from over-seas.

Total Unique Visits

I haven't posted this chart in a while. The chart to the left contains the same data for Unique Visitors as the last posting. The difference here is that the data goes back to 2001, and the chart does not contain the other traffic information. Click the chart for a larger view.

It may appear that there are large fluctuations in the traffic over the last few years, but the graph is misleading. The 'Interface Bus' site receives around 8,000 unique visits a day so a short month or a holiday will reduce those peaks by several thousand hits. A holiday could reduce the number of hits from 8,000 to 2,000, while a short month could lower the graph by 16,000 visits. Most of fluctuations are down 10 to 15,000.

In 2006 the server went down for a few days and the site lost more than 20,000 visitors. In 2005 the counter was changed to one that appeared more strict in counting. But a few months later the graph still showed more visitors regardless.

So as far as I'm concerned unique visitors to the web site have been flat from 2006 on. Stable is fine, but I would rather see some increase in site visits. I still work the site, but it seems the best I can do is keep things stable.

One common reason for a lack of any increase is interface bus obsolescence. Pages written years ago see less and less visitors as the topic moves to obsolescence. For Example the page on the PCI interface bus has fallen from 1,000 hits a week in mid 2006 to about 500 hits last week. The page on the AGP bus has seen the same reduction over the same time period. Because of PCIe both those computer interfaces were already on their way out by 2006.

The chart covers January 2001 to January 2009. I do have data back to 1999, but it would not help the graph and just make the graphic larger than needed.

Internet visits for the month of Jan

Web site visits for January came in at about what I expected. I still can't get the site's visits to increase, it may not look like it but these number are really flat.

The site receives around 8,000 visits a day, so on months with a holiday or with only 28 days the site hits could reduce by over 20,000 just because it's a short month.

Server Bandwidth:
The lowest curve is server bandwidth and does not relate to the other numbers on the chart. The bandwidth is hovering around 100,000 [on the chart] but really equates to 10GB as the numbers were changed to fit the graph.

Unique Visits:
Are visits from a computer within a month, but any one computer is only counted one time. If any one computer returns for a second visit it's counted by the Visits curve.

Visits:
A site visit is registered each time a person visits the site within a month and each time the person returns to the site. Site Visits should always be equal to or greater than Unique Visits.

Page Views:
Are the number of pages a person views per month, regardless of how many times the visitor returns to the web site. Page Views should always be equal to or greater than Site Visits. Page views are really the only data point that is falling. Page Views is related to Bounce Rate, which is the percentage a person visits one page and then leaves the site.

Bounce Rate:
The Bounce Rate for interfacebus is 71% for January. Or 71% of the people that visited the site viewed only one page during the month. Some individual pages have Bounce Rates of 20% while some may have rates as high as 98%. One page I just looked at [30-Pin SIMM] had a 77% Bounce Rate. When I looked at the data the Bounce Rate would cycle from 100% to 50% or 0%. So I went ahead and added links to simular memory modules; 72-Pin SIMM. Not really sure why I cared those 30 pin SIMMs have been obsolete for a decade now. But I know why the links were missing, key-word contamination, confussing the search engine as to what page the 72-pin SIMM was really on.

Google Knol Awards

Seems two of the Knols I wrote have won some awards. The two Knols both won a top viewed award, and a Top Pick Knol award. I assume somebody at Google made the notation for the "award", because they don't indicate any thing other than a small medal. Or this could just be like a smiley face kind of award. If it makes the knols show up sooner in a Knol search, that would be good.

I really would like to have the knols bring in more traffic to my web site. I think I posted the first Knol back in August 2008, now I have nine Knols. The two Knols that have the traffic banner have seen thousands of page views, but have only resulted in a few hundred visits to interfacebus.com.

Incoming traffic from Google Knol is sitting at 0.03% tracked over the last several months. But the search engine brings in the most when tracking hits due to Google.

Of course writing a web page and hoping for page views or traffic is more luck than another thing else. I added a few pages on FET derating over the last month, but they are only generating a few page views a day. In fact the page views are so low for that section they could just be from me checking the page.

Page hits and visits are up for January over December and may end up higher than either October and November.

Internet Visits from Africa

Here is a graphic showing web visits from the continent of Africa. The five sub-continent regions are shown indicating the amount of incoming traffic.

Northern Africa = 10,546 visits
Eastern Africa = 4,599 visits
Middle Africa = 269 visits
Western Africa = 3,241 visits
Southern Africa = 11,901 visits

In this map Southern Africa is made up of 3 countries; Namibia, Botswana, and South Africa. As you might guess South Africa produced all the visits with 11,379 hits. What's interesting is that when I zoom into South Africa to see the visits from the cities places like Cape Town don't place high. Johannesburg produced the largest visits followed by Pretoria and Auckland Park. I had to look up Auckland Park...

Eastern Africa is made up of 18 different countries, with Kenya producing the most visits; 1,460

Middle Africa only provided 269 visits from 8 different countries for an entire year. Cameroon had the most visits at 138.

Western Africa is divided into 16 different countries. Nigeria brought in the most traffic with 1,908 visits.

By far Egypt provided the most traffic from Northern Africa at 6,471.

Internet Visits from Asia

Normally I'll post graphics showing internet visits from countries or states within the US, this time it's the continent of Asia.
Western Asia visits = 54,370 hits
Southern Asia visits = 155,262 hits
Central Asia visits = 568 hits
Eastern Asia visits = 127,655 hits
South-Eastern Asia = 98,395 hits

Because of all the traffic from India, Southern Asia shows the largest amount of traffic.

While at the same time frame Central Asia has only a few incoming visits. Central Asia is made up of five break-away provinces from the USSR [in the 90's ?]. Guess that's why they were permitted to break-away, they had no internet or technology.

Israel provided the most traffic from Western Asia, just slightly above the traffic from Turkey.

China which was closely followed by South Korea sent in the most traffic from Eastern Asia.

The Philippines in South-Eastern Asia sent in the most traffic from that location.

Generating traffic from any of these countries is really out of my control. As I could always just want more traffic from the U.S. and spend time trying to generate more interest in this country. It's still interesting to see the location of incoming traffic. Plus, judging from the locations or time-zones, this is all traffic during the middle of the night ~ which is great.

Resistor Manufacturers

As part of interfacebus, I've had a page covering Manufacturers of Resistors on the web for about ten years now. The page covering Resistors is well established after 10 years on the internet

The Resistor vendors page grows in size or reduces as links are added or removed. The other day four 'redundant' manufacturers were removed from the listing as they all pointed to the company that acquired them. Normally I'll leave a reference to a company that was purchased so people can still find the new company, but after awhile the old link gets removed.

From the "What's New blog" I see a new page dealing with Current Sense Resistors was added in April 2008. Adding a related page to resistors means removing all references to Current Sense Resistors from the main Resistor listing, so that they only show up on the new page, other wise both pages would appear to cover the same topic. Of course removing any information relating to current sense resistors reduces the amount of text from on the main resistor page.

April 2008 also saw a number of new pages that related to Resistors but did not require information being drained off the main resistor page. The new pages provided more incoming links [external pages linking to] the Resistor Manufacturers page. Incoming links should help a page gain visits by providing additional ways to find a page topic. How ever at the same time similar topics on the same web site could end up dividing the traffic between all related topics.

The point is I see a reduction in visits to the Resistor Manufacturers page over the last few years. Page views in 2006 seemed flat, but appeared to start decreasing from 2007 on. Page visits look stable from July 2008 on but are down 60 percent.

Googlebot Crawl Stats

Here is the latest graph on Googlebot crawl stats, or how often the Googlebot spider checks interfacebus.com. For reference, the previous Googlebot crawl rate.

The previous 90 days ending in October showed an average of 452 pages spidered each day, while this chart shows 523 pages a day.

The amount of data down-loaded has increased to over 6,405k bytes [6Meg], but the time spent downloading the information has decreased by 100mS. So the spider is reading more data faster, which is good.
July crawl rate.
Sep 07 crawl rate.
Jan to July o7 crawl rate.

2008 Visits from Countries

Attached is the Google Analytics map for the world showing hits from each country. Google uses a color code, I added the text.

United States; 907,029 visits
United Kingdom; 126,399 visits
India; 121,684
Canada; 98,013
Germany; 64,810

Highest hits during last year

Took a few data points from last years visits.

Language; 57,297 visits; German [de]
Browser; 1,352,562 visits; Internet Explorer [30.01%]
OS; 1,680,333 visits; Windows XP [84.16%]
Java Support; 2,052,254 visits [96.13%]
Traffic Sources, Referring Site; 19,938 visits [en.wikipedia.org]
Traffic Sources, Search Engine; 1,681,379 visits [google]

India had the highest non-US visits [U.S.A. had the most hits].

Total from all sites in 2008 include:
1,982,780 Visits
3,717,226 Pageviews

Remember non-Java supported Browsers are not counted.

External Web Linking

Here is a listing of web page addresses with only one external page link from another web site. In most cases the external link is really coming from the web site's sitemap, which is located on another server.

The list only indicates a total of 1,032 pages, while the main sitemaps page indicates 1,414 URLs.

How to Derate a Connectors.

Limiting the maximum current used by connector pins.

How to Derate Power Supplies.

How to Derate Switches.

Manufacturers of DC-to-DC Converter ICs.

A list of Voltage Converter IC vendors.

Joystick for the Apple IIc computer.

An out dated interface on the Apple Computer.

PC104 Board Dimensions.

Graphic of PC-104 card.

Manufacturers of Embedded Backplanes.

Industrial or non-commercial Back-Planes.

Listing of Single Board Computer Form Factors.

Sizes of SBC formats.

Manufacturers of Cable Clamps.

Companies that produce cable clamps.

Strain Relief Manufacturers.

Definition of Gray Code.

Hex Symbol Table.

Some of these pages should have showed up in the 'what's new blog' in addition to the sitemap, but must be missing. Having external web links help increase the page ranking of the page being linked to. But the page linking in needs to have a page rank of its own.

Web Statistics

Web analytics indicate an average year The server side counter AWSTATs indicates 2,326,184 visits while Google Analytics shows 2,131,879 visits with 3,987,364 Pageviews.

2007 had 2,354,985 web visits and 4,063,901 page impressions

2006 had 1,550,092 web visits and 3,688,317 page impressions

It appears that 2007 had a bit more traffic than 2008

Sitemap Generator

I up-loaded a new XML sitemap to Google [Google, Webmaster Tools, Sitemaps]. The current XML sitemap contains 1,859 submitted URLs, as reported by Google. The previous XML sitemap was last up-loaded on August 16th and contained 1,727 URLs. So 132 new pages were added to the web site over the last 4 months. The last site map caused 1,318 URLs to be indexed by Google.

During this same time frame 968 html files were changed or up-dated in some fashion. However the up-dates could be just html fixes in some cases.

The program GSiteCrawler is used to spider the site and generate an XML Sitemap. Because of the bandwidth required I only generate a sitemap once every few months. The program has to check every page on the web site. But once the site map is generated and up-loaded to the server the bandwidth usage remains the same. Google reads the sitemap once every few days regardless of how old it is. So if Google is going to download the sitemap from the server it may as well be up to date.

Other search engines find the site map via a comment in the robots.txt file on the server. That comment happens to point to another web site which also holds the sitemap.xml file. So only Google downloads the sitmap from my server, all other search engines get the same file from another server [saving me bandwidth].

I also started to update the HTML version of the sitemap, the human readable version. I added 18 new page addresses to the sitemap that had been added to the site from 8/16 to 10/16. I up-loaded what I had and will add the previous two months as time permits.

A few days ago I spidered the site using Xenu to check for broken web links. Xenu indicates 2% of the 6,105 URLs on the site were bad. However giving them a few days to come back proved that only about a dozen URL links were really gone. I did end up deleting or removing a few links.

Adding Pages to Increase Visits

I keep track of new page additions to the web site via another blog. So far this year about 190 new pages have been added to interfacebus.com, a few other new additions to the other web sites. However many of the new pages are small in size which makes it hard to compete with similar pages with more content on the internet. Of course even if the new pages do not show well in the search engine rankings [SERPS] they still serve to support the web site.

What Page Rank a page receives is determined by the search engines, as is when a page receives a Page Rank. Page Rank and Search Engine position are both determined by the search engines, with Google bringing in the vast majority of incoming visitors.

Of course some pages just might not do well because they have little or no content;
Manufacturers of Solderless Terminals,
Manufacturers of Water Alarm Units,
Synchro definition,
Mazda Engine Control System, [New page]
Residual Current Device definition,
Manufacturers of Thermal Adhesive Compounds, [No page linking in]
Industrial Mezzanine Board Formats, [No page linking in]
Industrial Tool Manufacturers,

So those are a few of the pages that have had the fewest visits this year. In two cases it appears like there were no other pages that pointed to them, which would explain why the page received no hits.

It's a bit hard to find the low performing pages because the list is full of misspelled page addresses, which return a 404 page not found code. The list of 'Top' Content' is generated by Google Analytics and contains 18,718 line items for the year. However I only checked the top 2,500 as all the rest of the list is just misspelled page addresses. The Mazda page is 1,670 line items from the top of the list [surrounded by misspelled web addresses].

Adding new pages does not guaranty more traffic

Web History Stats

Went ahead and started to compare web stats for this year and last. So far they look about the same. Of course I don't have any data for December yet, but I can estamate that. Last year. December saw 126,000 unique visitors. So I should see around 1,650,000 visitors this year, or about the same amount as last year.

Google PageRank Reduced

I noticed my Google PageRank reduced from a 5 to a 4 on interfacebus.com. The site has had a PageRank of 5 for years now, although I have seen a reduction in the past. Using Google Webmaster Tools I can see which page on the site has the highest PageRank. Back in August a page other the the index page had the highest PageRank, so it does go up and down.

It could be that the Home page was just a 5.0 instead of say a 5.8 so maybe it's common for the index to slide between a four and 5, but I don't see a PageRank of 4 that often.

Why does the PageRank change; well it's recalculated each month. Some page that link to you may be off-line when the GoogleBot checks them making appear that fewer external pages are being linked in at any given time.

MS Web Site Issues

OUTDATED TEXT REMOVED, 6-28-2010

Same thing happened with the browser that Google came out with; Chrome. I could not access the site data using that browser either ~ There is a previous post about that issue, I think. So now, Firefox now longer works. What, it's an MS site, so only Internet Explorer will work on a Microsoft Soft web site.........

Any way I posted a graphic which shows hits to serialphy.com, which is another site I operate. The two main items are the Orange line which shows unique visits, and the yellow line which depicts number of visits.

I see an increase in visitors, so I'm fine with that. Notice I do not provide any hard numbers ~ there to low...... Oh, November is low because it's still mid-month, so that data will not be available for another 15 days.

Spider Crawl Stats

I just checked the crawl stats for interfacebus.com using Google's Webmaster Tools. The attached graphic shows Googlebot's [Google's spider] activity over the last 90 days.

The first two graphs appear normal, but the last graph does not. Check out the reduction in time to spider a page even as the amount of data downloaded has increased.

Does this mean that my server has gotten faster over the last few months? Or maybe Google is coming out at 3am when there are less people using the server?

What's new blog

Looks like the companion blog used to indicate new pages to interfacebus.com is a year old now. The blog just provides a link to new pages as they are added to the site. There were 35 entries last year and another 73 additions this year for a total of 108 separate blog pages. Many of these pages contain several 'new' links to pages that were just added to the site, so a few hundred pages have been added over the last year.

Open Office Down Load

Open Office came out with a new version the other day. So I went ahead and down loaded version 3.0 of Open Office tonight. I think the previous version I used was 2.4, but I'm not really sure.

Open Office is one of the free versions of MS Office, but produce by another company and it has nothing to do with Microsoft. Free is a lot better than $600.......

Check it out at openoffice.org,