Traffic Report No. 02
Following up on my previous traffic report, things haven’t changed much over the course of the year. I continue to get 15-30 hits per day, though I suspect many of those are spambots. My best day was 120 hits for reasons I don’t understand. If there were more comments and greater discussion, I would be more inclined to post more often. (There are no lack of ideas to develop — I just have other priorities when I appear to be working in a vaccuum.) There was also a period when The Spiral Staircase appeared to be driving most of the referral traffic to Creative Destruction, the group blog at which I also post. That time has passed, and indeed, that group of bloggers (including me) seem only half-heartedly interested in maintaining that blog’s raison d’etre, which is an ongoing robust discussion of a variety of ideas from a variety of perspectives.
With a couple long holiday weekends in front of me, I expect to knock out additional entries on topics I’ve been considering for a while. I’ve also decided to run a little experiment: until the end of the calendar year, I will unblock all the spam comments I get and let them go through. So readers can expect to see plenty of information on replica watches, celebrity nudes, penis enlargement, mortgage refinancing, etc. (I really don’t get why spammers continue dumping this stuff on online venues. Do they really get traffic and make any money from that?) After the first of the year, I’ll go back to blocking the spam and will probably delete the spam goes through in the next few days. If there is any real change in blog traffic, I would be surprised. Maybe The Spiral Staircase will be indexed more frequently with the increase in commenting activity. Who knows?
Update
As expected, my experiment (approving all spam comments) yielded no observable increase in either traffic or meaningful commentary. I thought perhaps I would attract more spam, but that doesn’t appear to have been the case. Numbers stayed pretty consistent with past experience. There didn’t appear to be any clickthroughs to spam links. So I’ve deleted all the spam comments and will return to business as usual.
