Understand Radio Referers

Al Macintyre's Radio Weblog : Al's random interests while learning what can be done with Weblogging, and perhaps what ought to be done.

Understand Radio Referers

You may have found a comment on your weblog, or someone else's which said something like this.

I stumbled over your site while exploring other places visited by people on my referers list, which is an art form that I have not developed well enough yet to write coherently about, but you can be sure that eventually the topic will turn up in one of my posts.

Well this story tries to explain what Radio Referers are, and how I am locating those other places, which so far is not a well developed art form that I can coherently explain. I am basically experimenting, but have now learned enough that it might be worth sharing my student notes with other students on a parallel learning curve. Once you understand this at least through the same point as Al, you might also check out links in my Radio Wishes on Referer Archives Navigation.

This article is one of a series in which Al Macintyre tries to explain the basics in the same way as this one, or should be helpful to beginners transitioning to getting comfortable with how to use this software. Sometimes a link to one of my stories gets inexplicably broken (with the title in double quotes not being properly translated into a hyperlink, and I cannot figure out how to fix it on a timely basis. Use this directory of my stories as a backup if need be. http://radio.weblogs.com/0107846/stories/

Here are referers for Al Macintyre's Radio Weblog. You can find yours by navigating to your Radio Home Editing screen, then scrolling to far right where there is a vertical menu, starting with Cloud links. Second option there is your Referers.

Because our referers only show the last 24 hours worth of stuff and are cleared at approx midnite PST, I have been trying to visit them each evening, cut paste what is there to my Referer Archives collection to see what is new connection to me that I might want to explore. A Radio Tip here is that other people might want to do something similar. I believe there are some tools out there to simplify the process, but I want to understand what is going on before I complicate my situation with some Tool.

Here I talk about the distinction between the actual link to your site and people using that link. If you are interested in finding links to your site that are not currently being used by anyone, check out my story "Search Engine Tips".

According to the Documentation, Referers are a list of places that have linked to our weblog in the last 24 hours, supposedly. I think what happens is that someone posts something on their web site that is a link to us, but that does not show up on the Referers until someone actually uses the link. See Alison Fish suggestions in my Search Engine Tips for some ideas on how to get at links that no one has actually used yet..

For purposes of this discussion, I am person A.
I post something on day 1.
- Search engines will probably ignore this for 48 hours.
On day 4 person B sees my post, finds it interesting, publishes something on their site about it, with link to my weblog giving credit.
- That link is not to my actual post, but to my weblog.
- Search engines will probably ignore this for 48 hours.
On day 8 person C sees the stuff on person B site, follows the link to my weblog.
That causes a hit on my referers, identifying person B site for the first time for me.
- Person C is not identified by this process.
- I think the number after the url of the referer is the number of times any person used that link on that date, to get to person A site.
The referer points me to person B site, not to the actual post, so I am scrolling around the site looking for it. It might even be in one of their Navigation Links, buried inside Radio Outliner.
Persons D E F, also not identified, mean additional hits, all identifying person B site as to what connected to me.
- I have a Radio Wish that Referers and News Aggregation reposts did a better job of linking back directly to actual item post, not just to general site.
In this story, we know only the identities of Person A (who did the original post that is being visited) and Person B (whose link is being used to access the original post). However, some information can be derived or inferred about Persons C D etc.
- Take a look at what I had to say about Alexa on Sept 9.
  - Apparently this search engine tracks Persons C D etc. as they visit Person A B etc. sites, and also as they visit other web sites, then we can see on the basis of Person A or B web sites, what the other web sites are that got visited, but we do not see who Persons C D etc. are.
- One of the referers that shows up occasionally is Organica.
  - This apparently is a tool of the search engine world, and it has identified 10 web sites that link to me, and 660 that I have linked to. As we can see from the Search Engine Tips explorations, different Search Engines work with different combinations of sites, which explains us being aware of more sites linking to us than the Search Engines are finding, and different ones finding different numbers. You can be sure my curiosity takes me to the 10 sites that linked to me.
- Many hits on my referers I can recognize as my own usage, as I navigate around my site, or post stuff to the Radio Discussion Group.
- About 1/3 to 1/2 of the hits in my referers are thanks to people using search engines, and as a result I have rewritten some of my posts to further clarify the apparent reasons the searches were phrased the way they were.
  - There is a Nigerian woman who is to be executed because the father of the baby refuses to pay the medical expenses. Initially I did a small post giving url of Amnesty International Petition against this injustice.
  - But then I saw lots and lots of referers where people using Search Engines looking for information on this alleged hoax story, so I dramatically enhanced my picture so that anyone who connected to my web site would see ample evidence that this is no hoax.
- Some hits on my referer list due to search engines seemed to me to be very intelligent use of advanced search techniques which I can learn from, and sometimes I like to visit other sites found by those searches, since I am interested in the same topics as correct usage of the search engines.

Most of Al's referers are due to someone doing a search for something and finding link to something Al wrote, which I suspect will grow in volume, relative to other sources, as my weblog grows in content and links. Andrew Hicks has been watching this longer than Al, and has some ideas on helping such visitors more easily navigate to what they are looking for.

Not all links to my weblog are because some other weblogger or journalist saw something they thought was interesting, or because a search engine used my site as an answer to someone question. Spammers are now using referer logs as a way to get people to visit their advertisements. They search backlinks on our site, like a search engine might, then arrange to have links from their ads to your referrers so that anyone who explores the Internet using referer links will then arrive at their advertisements.

Some hits on my referers are links on someone else's referers. Let's apply Al theorizing to see how Al believes that is happening.

Al has got Radio Doc Sources and other little projects that other Radio Webloggers are finding to be a useful reference.
Person B does something else impressive (e.g. Mark's Accessibility, Seb's Directories of Weblogs by Profession) so Al adds that to Radio Doc Sources.
Al mentions to dws.Radio.FAQ about various updates here, and also in Radio Userland Discussion Group in answer to some questions, points them to possible solutions linked through Al's Radio Doc Sources.
Other Webloggers mention Al's Radio Doc Sources or some other resource of Al.
Visitors to those Weblogs follow the link to Al's stories.
- This puts those other Weblogger sites, that are mentioning Radio Doc Sources or whatever, onto Al's referers.
- That evening, Al tries to check out his referers before midnite PST when they get wiped, usually by visiting sites to see what this or that place is saying about Al.
  - That puts Al site onto the referer lists of the other Weblogger sites, but not until an hour or so before the midnite PST wipe out.
- Al also checks referers earlier in the day, in case this will be one of the evenings when Al is asleep when had intended to be doing a wee hour inspection.
Those visitors next follow link from Al's stories to the Persons B sites, that Al is suggesting are great solutions to common questions.
- This puts Al's site onto the referer lists of the Person B services that Al's Radio Doc Sources or whatever was listing.
- Just like Al checks Al's referers, Persons B might also check their referers periodically.
  - Checking your referers, finding a link to Al's site, and actually going to that site, causes your referer list to now be one of Al's referers.
So I have now answered the question of how come sometimes one of the links on our referers list is someone else's referers list.

Another question that we might have is Who is subscribing to our RSS feed? (See Understand Radio News Aggregation for further clarification) ... I am sure you are already familiar with this page

http://subhonker6.userland.com/rcsPublic/ranking = weblogs which were the most popular today, as measured by number of page reads.
Now compare the appearance of that page with this one
http://subhonker6.userland.com/rcsPublic/ranking?group=rss = RSS feeds which are the most popular, as measured by number of subscribers.
Of course here we only get to see the top 100 sites which have not used their preferences to opt out of the RU ranking system