Hit Count Mystery Solved
Category: Navel Gazing...
Posted Sunday, April 25, 2004 at 10:29 PM [GMT-6]

I think I've answered my own rhetorical question in an earlier post, where I wondered if anyone else had seen a big increase in traffic from search engine referrals.

Until last weekend, when I spent quite a bit of time working under the hood of the Gazette, so to speak, I had never put the Site Meter counter script anywhere except the front page. When I copied the content seen in the right column of the page to all of the individual post archives, that counter script was included. I never gave it a second thought, but I now understand that what I'm seeing are the visits to the archived pages that were not being counted before.

This make sense. All visits from someone else's blogroll will land on the Gazette's front page. The only visits to the archived pages are those which originate either from trackback links in another blog's post, or from search engines.

The moral of the lesson is pretty simple: if you want your Site Meter stats to look as good as possible, put that counter on every page of your blog! (Not that any of us care about such things. Nosireebob; we're above that sort of narcissistic distraction.)