Saturday, September 01, 2007

August Traffic & Links

August is not only a quiet month in the MSM - it is on blogs. However, despite that traffic this August was 20% up on last year, but also 20% down on July. Unique visitor were 188,515 compared to 148,013 last year. Page views were 334,116 (2006 261,667).

Here are my top 40 linking sites (ie incoming hits) for July. All these sites referred at least 100 people here. The arrows denote whether a site has moved up or down or stayed static since July...

1. Guido Fawkes 14% ↔ 2. ConservativeHome 13.6% ↑ 3. PoliticalBetting 7.6% ↓ 4. Biased BBC 2.5% ↑ 5. Islington Newmania 1.3%↑ 6. Dizzy Thinks 1.3% ↑ 7. Daniel Finkelstein 1.3% ↓ 8. Slugger O'Toole 1.1% ↑ 9. Daily Referendum ↑ 10. W4MP ↓ 11 Spectator Coffee House NEW 12. Hot, Ginger & Dynamite ↑ 13. Ed Clarke ↓ 14. Archbishop Cranmer ↑ 15. Hoby Cartoons ↑ 16. Prisoner's Voice ↑ 17. Bloggerheads ↓ 18. Luke Akehurst ↓ 19. Paul Linford ↓ 20. Chris Paul ↓ 21. British Bullshit Foundation ↔ 22. LibDem Voice ↓ 23. Justin Hinchcliffe ↑ 24. Liberal England ↓ 25. EU Referendum NEW 26. David Lindsay ↑ 27. Peter Black NEW 28. UK Polling Report NEW 29. Mikey's Tent of Reality ↑ 30. Waendel Journal ↑ 31. Fair Deal Phil NEW 32. Prague Tory ↓ 33. Right Thinking ↓ 34. A Conservative's Blog ↓ 35. Some Doubts ↑ 36. Norfolk Blogger ↓ 37. Tim Worstall NEW 38. Harry's Place NEW 39. Miscellany Symposium NEW 40. An Englishman's Castle

Those dropping out of the top 50 are Tom Watson MP, Witanagemot, Devil's Kitchen, Croydonian, Pickled Politics, Bob Piper, Neil Reddin, Blairwatch, Adam Smith Institute, Nadine Dorries, Kiwiblog, Political Hack, House of Dumb, Phil Taylor, Electoral Calculus,

Link exchanges are really important in driving traffic to other sites. A big thank you to everyone who links to me. Remember, if you have a link to me and you don't see one to you on my blogroll, just let me know in the comments and I will try to rectify it.

17 comments:

Anonymous said...

I'm reading this at 1.33am on Saturday 1st September yet your blog times it at 7.00am. I know you can do this "time manipulation" stuff on Blogger and it can be useful. But if we are accusing the BBC and other TV stations of 'faking it' do you think we should follow these practices too?

Just a thought.

Iain Dale said...

Old Nick, I have to admit I was experiementing. Someone has explained to me how I can write a post and then set a time for it to appear. It involves sending an email. Obviously I have done it wrong. I have now altered the time back to when I actually sent it - if you see what I mean.

Anonymous said...

Well done for 'fessing up Iain!

Tapestry said...

Is there a blogging school somewhere? I have no idea even after one complete year of blogging how to make all these other things work like blog rolling, putting a picture up and so on... I try for about 20 minutes, fail, give up and move on. Yes, I know it's pathetic, but it's not my bag and I just need a few hours of instruction somewhere. Why not open the Iain Dale blogging school? £250 a day per learner?

Ken said...

OK, I'm in, and your link is live.

Text: The Money Blog
URL: http://www.ask-ken.info/blog

By the by, you have no follow tags enabled on this blog's comments. Stripping them out is easy. Just go into your template, scroll down to the comments bit, find the no follow line and remove it.

kinglear said...

www.3rdseptember.blogspot.com
Kinglear

Praguetory said...

The Tap - when I first started I had the same issues. Come to visit Prague and I'll sort you out.

PS - Being as my blog has stopped, I'm rather surprised to remain in the top referrers.

S said...

Iain, as much as I'm delighted to sneak my way into the Top 40 referrals list, I think these stats are a little dubious. You say

"All these sites referred at least 100 people here"

To me this implies that 100 different people were referred via these sites. I very much doubt that 100 different people not only visited my site, but also while they did so, clicked on a link to your site.

For a variety of reasons I have moved away from using RSS readers so much and started using the blogroll on my blog as a dashboard for blogs I visit, so I imagine the majority of the referrals from my blog are click throughs from myself checking on new posts and updated comments. Being a regular reader of many of the other sites in the list I imagine that the same principle applies for a significant number of these too.

I think a rewording to something along the lines of "all of these sites provided at least 100 hits(visits)" might be more appropriate.

Anonymous said...

"By the by, you have no follow tags enabled on this blog's comments. Stripping them out is easy."

The purpose of the 'no follow' tag/attribute is to remove the incentive for comment spamming. Why would anyone want to remove it?

Ken said...

What stops spamming is comment moderation and word verification - this blog has 'em both.

No-follow tags just stop links being created, and make it more difficult for smaller blogs to get off the ground.

On the subject of links, mine had better go under your miscellaneous heading I suppose.

Tapestry said...

Prague here I come - except I'm off to Phiolippines end of next week. Thanks for offer. One day.

Anonymous said...

www.uptonmatters.com

The Splund said...

Any chance of a link, Iain - I link to you. thesplund.blogspot.com

S said...

Oh... I forgot, and a link would be nice too please (I did ask last month)

Miscellany Symposium

Steven_L said...

I have a link to you Iain and you don't link to me. I assumed that you just didn't like me.

It's at http://thoughtsfromtheborders.blogspot.com/

Can you list it as an 'attack blog' as I am not a member of the conservative party but write rude things about Labour politicans.

Today I have been making a new blog at

http://redken4mayor2008.blogspot.com/

It doesn't link to you yet, because it's not finished, but your site will be listed under the heading 'capitalist pigs' or suchlike.

Luke Akehurst said...

I may be dropping off, but I'm glad to see that at least I haven't sunk completely below the waves like my old bunk-bed mate Thicko Watson.

Renoir said...

http://ollysonions.blogspot.com/

for the funny?