Do you look at referring urls?

• June 7, 2009

I like to look at referrers for two reasons.
First of all I spend a bit of time moving traffic from one point of my network to another and it makes me feel good to see my own urls in the referring list. It lets me know that the filtering system at least looks like it is working.
Secondly I want to make certain that my own "in house" traffic is just part of the incoming. Fresh traffic is always needed and it helps to see where that traffic is coming from. It also gives me a chance to see what directories are being productive, what social sites are working for me, and what SEs, if any, are sending traffic.
So I looked at an Asian blog at 3 this afternoon and grabbed the latest 20 referring urls (NOT including mine). The list included the following:
10 Directories (Mad Blogs, Yobt, Quality Adult Blogs, SexBlogs, ZBlogList, Adult Blog Spider, Sexblogle, Sex Blog Hunter, Porn Blog Catalog, SeoulKoreaSex)
5 Social sites (SoSo, Garamoff, Pureazn, teenthaisex, seymourtotti)
4 search engines (Google, Yahoo, AOL, and NetZero)
1 PicRush (NaughtyPrince.thumblogger)
I have 16 directories on the blog (3 are mine). So out of the 13 possible directories to send hits 10 did. Not a bad percentage but i will now have to check the other blogs I have the three unproductive directories on to see if they are producing there. I usually try to hit 25 to 30 social sites once a week for each blog so only 5 sendng hits just shows me that the Social thing isn’t working for me (at least in the Asian niche). The 4 SEs sending traffic is good but I would like to see MSN on the list too. The one PicRush hit is about average.
Does this mean anything to or for anybody? Not really. The point is that it helps sometimes to get a grip on "where" your traffic is coming from in order to decide what to do with that traffic. It also lets you judge how effective your linking system is and gives you clues on whether you need to refocus your efforts. For instance—I will stop using the social sites on this blog and invest that 15 to 20 minutes a week into improving posistion on MSN. Referring urls are just one of many things you can look at to get another piece of the puzzle.
There is no set % of what is good or bad written down anywhere. Most agree the higher the SE numbers the better. A lot feel that directory traffic is marginal at best. So knowing where your traffic is coming from is just a small part of the equation. But for stats nuts it is interesting and it also keeps you from checking your sales stats for a few hours.

Read more at: sponsorchat.com