Tell me who visits the site

Engineering companies that visited interfacebus.com this year.
Determined by their Network Location as reported by Google Analytics

The ranking is provided by Google, as are the network names.
The missing ranking's are normal commercial internet providers.
Of course no one company will out perform a large internet provider.
Ranking by # of visitors
23. raytheon company 7,089 visits
34. lockheed martin corporation 5,859 visits
38. northrop grumman corp. 4,778 visits
43. navy network information center (nnic)  4,583 visits
45. 754th electronic systems group 4,470 visits
47. computer sciences corporation 4,183 visits
49. vitro corporation 4,109 visits
50. honeywell international inc. 4,027 visits
51. general electric company 4,010 visits
53. the boeing company 3,930 visits
56. intel corporation 3,850
59. national aeronautics and space administration 3,631 visits
61. l-3 communications corporation 3,568 visits
68. headquarters usaisc 3,366 visits
87. texas instruments 2,412 visits
88. rockwell international corporation 2,395 visits
90. dod network information center 2,296 visits
92. cisco systems inc. 2,260 visits
98. hewlett-packard company 2,200 visits
106. harris corporation 2,064 visits
108. level 3 communications inc. 1,994 visits
122. itt aerospace/communications division 1,800 visits

This data is from 1/1/09 to 10/17/09
Just as an example Raytheon [#23] sent in a consistent average of 180 visits per week.
The ones that got my notice were the military sites which were out performing a number of other companies;
DOD sites: #43, 45, 68, and #90, I had to look up #68 I never heard of them [United States Army Information Systems Command].

Can I do any thing with this data, no but it's interesting to pull up every few years...

Photo credit; US Navy: USS Nimitz.

I'm sending Spam mail to myself

Of the 24 e-mails I've received in the last 5 hours today Google has sent all of them into my spam box, four are from me. Yea, that's right my e-mail address is sending me spam. Ok not really, that's just how insecure email really is. You can make it look like an email comes from any one. For years now I've been reading about how 'they' were going to change things and make email more secure or reliable , but still no action.

Of course I don't read these incoming e-mails that get redirected into the spam folder. After years of using Gmail I haven't seen a mistake yet, well maybe one out of thousands of emails [maybe one a few years ago].  But Google and Gmail is pretty good about catching most if not all spam and directing all of them into my spam folder so I don't have to deal with them.

My other gmail account doesn't even display the spam folder any more. The older account always had [or has] 1000's of spam e-mails in the spam folder at any one time and I couldn't even delete them fast enough. Guess Gmail picked up on that.

So anyway my point is, how many people realize they send out spam mail, or really that somebody else is sending out spam email in their name. Any way; Google knows this trick, so classifies the message as Spam, and advises you that it has come from your address , replacing that by "from me". It guesses that since the message isn't in your Sent Mail display that it's a spoof, and even tells you so!

Any way if you ever get an email from interfacebus it doesn't really mean it came from me.

The graphic is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike 2.0 License.

Blog Feedburner Status

Here is another look at how Feedburner for the Blog is doing, and I'm not to sure how this chart differs from the one in the Blog about Feedburner Stats [below]. But it would appear that some where between 50 and 90 people are reading the Feed each day [ignoring the days with zero views].

Now a previous posting talking about blog visits showed a graph with about 60 plus a-day, so I guess Feedburner may be helping [Free Blog Space and SEO Stuff].

Because normal blog visits appear to be remaining about the same, that implies that I'm keeping my visitors to the blog and gaining visitors to the blog feed [I guess]. Referrals to interfacebus from blogspot have not appeared to change. Feed burner also shows a map of visitor locations, but it appears that the only people reading the feed are from the US and Canada.

Related Postings;
Feedburner Stats; 10/5/09.
I'm Burning Feeds Again; 9/28/09.
Graphic: Aggregate Item Use, number of people viewing the feed.

Visitors by Web Browser

Just in case any one is still following the Browser wars. The chart shows the type of browser used by visitors to the web site so far this year. Click the graphic for a larger image. The related links below provide graphs of previous years data. All the data shown here is from Google Analyics for visitors to the interface bus site.


Browser Comparison
       Firefox vs. Internet Explorer
2009 = 34.12% vs. 56.22%
2008 = 30.01% vs. 63.36%
2007 = 25.10% vs. 69.06%
2006 = 20.93% vs. 73.08%

Related Postings.
Is there a Browser War, 6/11/08.
Web Browser Issues, 7/4/06.

You can see from the chart that Google Chrome which just started a year ago is already getting 3% of the traffic or users, winning out over Opera.

Googlebot Crawl Rate

I took a look at how Google's spider was reading my site today. The search engine spider used by Google is called Googlebot. So far this month Googlebot has used up 43MB of bandwidth [as seen by AWSTATS]. Last month Googlebot used 64 MegaBytes of bandwidth via 7327 hits to the server. The attached graphic shows a high of 1,184 hits with an average of 557 hits and a low of 198 hits per day. The website update rate is;
Oct.: 202 page updates
Sep.: 336 pages updates
Aug.; 253 page updates
July; 165 page updates
So it would appear that Google is just barely picking up on the pages that get updated, if only because Googlebot will sometimes reread the same page more than once.

Related Posts;

Googlebot Crawl Stats; Jan 11 2009.
Spider Crawl Stats; Oct 24 2008.
Googlebot Crawl Stats; July 4 2008.
Robot Visits; Sep 14 2007.
Google Crawl Rate; April 14 2007.
Each one of these older posts provides a graphic of the crawl rate.

Yearly High in Unique Visitors

I blogged on Friday about the number of hits or visits coming in because I noticed an increase during a month that normally shows an average amount of visits. The previous day I noted that the incoming visits had amounted to the second largest number of visitors during the year. [Seasonal Fluctuations of Web Visits]

Well yesterday just became the day that received the largest amount of visitors for the entire year. Yesterday ended up with just a tad over 9,000 visitors for the day, or maybe about a hundred over the previous high. Now it's common to see days producing 8,800 visitors, and even more common to see visits in the 8,500 range, but the important point to note here is that the count went over 9,000.

I can't tell why the visitors are increasing; how ever there are a few reasons that come to mind. Perhaps some new page additions just got spidered [found by the search engine], maybe some of the pages added over the last month or so just made it into the Search Engine Pages [SEPs], or maybe some of the page enhancements made over the last month are bringing in new visitors. But really there is just no way to tell why I'm seeing an increase.

Remember it takes time for a search engine to find any changes to your web site. Normally I assume about 15 days before Google finds or reads one of my pages. Another 30 days before a page really starts to show up in the search results [if at all], and another 3 months before that new page receives a Page Rank [if it ever gets a page rank]. However because I post new pages additions out to Blogger [New Engineering Additions], Google really sees the new page address the same day, but I'll bet it does not go out and read it then. Of course Google re-orders their listing every month so maybe I just show up higher in the results now, and has zero to do with any updates....

Graphic; Monthly History AWSTATS: 1/1/09 to 10/13/09

What is wrong with Internet Explorer 8

What the heck is going on with MS Internet Explorer version 8.0.
Most times [but not all] when I right click on a link to either open in a new window or new tab, they open but the page never comes in. So I'm on a site which I want to remain open, right click the link to display in a new tab. Well the tab opens, but I just get the hour glass [for ever]. However the page opens immediately in the original window or by pasting the address into an already open tab, I can get the page to open in any other window.

So what is the deal with MS IE 8 about opening new tabs or windows?

I use three different browsers in two different displays to open up three different sets of web pages, so I still want to use IE even if I have problems with it.

I'm using IE version 8.0.6001.18813
Protected Mode; On
Photo credit; US Army, Stryker hit by a IED in Iraq.

Web Visits and Seasonal Fluctuations

Figured I would produce a different chart then I normally would. Just to show a different view point.

The number of visits coming in this week are some of the highest of the year, but not the highest because a day in March produced the most visitors [so far].

Any way it just doesn't seem like the incoming hits were matching prior trends, so I generated this graph to actually show the high and low trends by month. Yes I know the trend line is flat for the last three years, I'm working on it.

So the best month of the year is in March or sometimes January is a good month. The worst months are at the end of the year in December or mid year around June/July. It just seems odd that if this months hits continue at their present rate that October could be the month with the most visitors this year. Of course I only have a week of data this month, but I looked back over this year and did not find visits per day this high. In fact last month was the highest number of hits in September in the last three years..... There are already a number of older posts that indicate why the visits are flat, so just scroll down the page with the next page link being on the right side.

Data Source; AWSTATS off my server [apposed to Google Analytic data which I also post]. FYI; Google's count would be 3% low because that percentage of visitors do not run Java Script which their counter requires.

SEO Advice; I noticed a few months ago that Google was posting the last revision date of pages as they were displayed in their SEPs. So now regardless of the update I make to a page I rev the text that indicates when the last time the page was updated. In previous up-dates I would only change the date for a major reversion, certainly not for some html change that no one could even see.

ESD Orphan Pages

I was checking a subsection of the site for hits, and I find a page with just one hit or visit this month. I look a little deeper and I couldn't find a page linking to it. I'm sure there is a page linking in, but I couldn't find it. The tracking code is on every page so Analytics will track visitors regardless of any cross links. However; normally zero page visits indicate no possible way of finding the page [really it was one page visit].

The page covered Methods of Static Generation. Which means it just held a table showing the top five ways of generating static electricity and their resulting electrostatic voltage. Looks like that page was just a supplemental page just added to hold the graphic, because it had almost no text at all.

The pages covering ESD terms is a small subsection of the main Engineering Dictionary section, linked off the page covering Engineering Terms, Es. Here are the ESD pages listed by the first term on the page:

Antistatic Property Definition. A to D.
Electric Field Definition. El.
Electrostatic Voltages. El.
Electrostatic Discharge Definition. Es.
Human Body Model Definition. H.
MIL-HDBK-263. Mil Specs.
Static Awareness.
IC ESD Pin Protection.
ESD Wrist Strap. Looks like this has no incoming links.

Photo credit; United States Navy

The issues with ESD on board a metal ship must be reduced a bit......

Knol Reader Status

One more posting on the health of the family of web sites that make up interfacebus. This time I'm reviewing how Google Knol is doing. I only just added Google Analytics to Google Knol a few months ago so visitor data only goes back that far; otherwise I have no tracking data. The graph shows data on a per day basis, and appears some what low but there are only 10 knols out there.

There are about half as many pages on knol as the Google sites webpage, which gets about twice as many visitors. But I like Google Knol because it gives me a separate web site to post articles on. Example Knol; Description of Solid State Drives.

Google Knol only sends four or five referrals over to interfacebus.com on a daily basis.

Previous Postings;

Knol is just not working for me. 7/16/09
Traffic from Google Knol. 10/11/08

Feedburner Stats

So its been seven days now since I started Feedburner. The chart shows the data over the last week. The blue line represents Reach and the green line represents subscribers to the Feed. The numbers are not additive, but are a per day count. The number of Subscribers to the feeds are running around 10 per day. Subscribers is not computed for browsers and bots that access your feed.  Reach is the total number of people who have taken action — viewed or clicked — on the content in your feed.

I've added a banner to a number of non-technical pages on the site, some of the faq pages. However the pages that had a banner added to them don't see a lot of visitors so it may be a few more weeks until more people see them. The banner that sees the most page views is the one on this blog.

Referrals from this blog are up 11% over 2007 and bring in around 700 visitors a year to the web site. The percentage of new visitors is 78% with a Bounce rate of 59%.

Free Blog Space & SEO Tactics

I went ahead and took a look at how these blogs are doing, following yesterdays posting about the health of the rest of the web sites. Looks like the visits are down a bit, but that's kind of understandable because I have not been posting that much over the last few months.  The graph combines visits from both blogs, click for a larger image. The large peak at the center of the date range is when I stated the other blog [New Page Additions to interfacebus]

Google Analytics indicate that the blogs send or refer around 250 people a month to interfacebus.com, I would assume most of those referrals are new visitors to the web site. The Bounce Rate or the rate that people only view one page after going to interfacebus.com is around 60%, and they stay for around 3 minutes.
The home page of the blog sends over the most visitors to the website, followed by people visiting the page relating to HDTV, SSTL Logic, and PCB Minimum Annular Ring Definition.

I'm not really sure what the news feeds I just started for the blogs will do to the blog visits. Either more people will see or find the feeds and visit the blogs, or people will just read the blog from the news feed and stop coming to the blog all together.

I still recommend running a blog, see 'why blog' below. In addition to the ten reasons listed in that posting it also gives me a chance to list web page address's here providing those pages with an external link.

Related posting's about blogging;

Start a blog to gain Site Visitors. 6/26/09
Blog Traffic. 5/15/08
Why Blog. 9/12/07
Blog Hits. 7/10/07

Web Site Health

I just spent some time looking over just how each of the web sites are doing, and they appear to be doing ok.

Yesterday I posted a graphic showing the increasing hits to the google sites location I run. There's  no doubt that the incoming hits are low, but they are on the increase and we're only talking about a dozen pages.

The analytic data for serialphy also shows a slight increase over the last year. However that site has triple the amount of pages but is only receiving a third amount of the visitors. I just updated a few of its pages with a bit more data.

Google analytics is also reporting an increase in visitors to the knols I've written, again there are only ten and only fifty people visited them yesterday. Five people were referred to interfacebus from knols yesterday.

The important site is interfacebus.com but the amount of visitors this year is flat at around 43,000 visitors a week +/- 5,000. The attached graphic indicates the analytic data for interfacebus, as complied from AWSTATS.

I didn't really check the data for the blog, but it appears to be flat as well. Interest in the blog feed is slowly increasing

Google Sites Advantage

The web site I run out on Google Sites seems to be doing better, at least for now [really sites.google].
Of course my site is called interfacebus, but it's under their domain string [sites.google/site/interfacebus]. But so what, it's free hosting, free website .... its free. The graphic is visits/week for Google Sites, click for a larger image.

Google sites replaced their old 'Google pages' which has closed down [mostly]. I ported the pages I had stored on the Google pages server over to Google Sites, and over the last several months added a few additional pages. The new page hosting plan is much better than the old one, however I did lose page ranking when I made the transfer. Right, the new site means new pages on the web, so page ranking takes awhile. However; the few pages I just checked do have a page rank from Google, but not the home page.

Sentence removed by editor. The first site map listed is pretty large so I'm glad it's taking up server bandwidth on some other server. Better yet hosting the site map on an external server means that I have an external site that points to every one of my pages ~ that's a good thing. Plus all the original pages they host for me also have a few links to different pages on my main site.

Now Google sites has only sent over 511 visitors to interfacebus.com over the last year which is really low. So interfacebus.com is not making any real money from that site. However; Google sites pages have received 9,389 page views over the same period, and because you can also run ads on their hosting service, I'm still making money [off that site], but I'd bet it wouldn't pay for lunch.

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.