• “Hallo?”
• “I’m Larry. I didn’t succeed in updating it.”

Those were the words he never wanted to hear.

• “Pardon, can you repeat please? I think I didn’t understand……”
• “You understood properly, Sergey. There’s no new post. It wasn’t updated.”
• “Are you sure about that? Did you run all controls?”
• “Otherwise I wouldn’t have called you. I know you are puzzled, but that’s the sad truth: he didn’t update the blog”

It was a long time that something so mysterious didn’t happen in Mountain View, and now it was important to take a decision at once:

• “What will we do then?”
• “You well know the procedure in these cases.”
• “Yes, but….maybe he was just too busy or he had an accident….”
• “It’s useless now to search for some excuses: the blog hasn’t been updated and we have to follow the procedure.”
• “OK Larry. Give advice to the Game Over department. Cut all pages, wipe them out from SERP. Close his AdSense account, kidnap his wife, steal his car and………..”

At this moment usually you suddenly wake up, in a cold sweat, while your mind takes its time to get in touch with the reality, and then you understand you were just dreaming, luckily….it was only a bad dream…….

Photo Credit: cybernesco

Come on, who is not victim of this fear? A fear that, with years, has taken place of the past and common nightmare of the missing high school license exam for an alarm-clock that didn’t go off. That’s a true nightmare for any blogger: what happens if I am not regular in updating my blog?

A part from any sort of blogger or information overload mania, what will really happen in case we stop up-dating our site? Which are the risks we run?

Here my personal experience when I stopped updating it for 2 months.

In the last two years, the italian version of Ikaro has been updated on average every week with 3 new articles, up to 23 June, 2007. From that day on up to 3 September 2007 I nearly abandoned it.

Let’s try now, examining all access statistics, if bloggers fears can be real or not.

2006 and 2007 access comparison

From Google Analytics I get all accesses trend referring to the period 23 June 06 – 03 September 2007: it is compared to the same period of time in 2007. We should notice that in 2006, my blog was updated quite regularly, while, in 2007 in was abandoned.

I must specify that it is much better to consider just its trend and not its absolute values, as one year of difference means more articles, more contacts, more links. In other words: more traffic. As much as about the trend, it is easy to find a sort of similarity up to the end of August, and after that period there is in 2007 a sudden and astonishing jump: that is to say after 2 months the blog was abandoned!

But this jump could be the result of off site elements, for example a sudden popularity of an article thanks to a keyword related to a subject ran on tv or on a newspaper. In other words, we still have few data to state that my site didn’t really suffer from 2 not updated months. Therefore, let’s extract the traffic and let’s do the same graphic for:

• Direct access
• Engine access

Direct access traffic comparison

Engine access traffic comparison

It seems to be quite clear that this raise was determined by traffic coming from all search engines, the one that we supposed to be the most suffering from such a long time blog inactivity.

Engine traffic analysis

Why do engines had such a raise in visits after 2 months inactivity? If we are so stubborn to refuse that updating frequently our blog is not that much important, not even a risk of being penalized from engines, we should think as well that the cause of such a raise is maybe an important keyword, which appeared in 2007, but was absent in 2006. But it isn’t so. Top keys are always the same ones, but in 2007 they were much more incisive in all serp. Here you have:

1. coolstreaming   +95%
2. voipstunt           +196%
3. pplive                   +33%
4. tv internet          +905%
5. software free    +100%

Conclusions

My conclusion is a simple one: all blogger mania of updating constantly one’s own web site with thousands of information, sometimes not interesting, is really useless. You can live your life quietly even if you don’t update your site so frequently as you think you should (a part in those cases in which such a frequency is an editorial choice, of course).

I realize that many SEO and marketers will disagree my statements but, on my turn, I disagree such a maniac and empiric way (supported by too many numbers, operations and formulas), stealing web marketing of its nature. Sometimes it is much better to stop calculating, forecasting or thinking to be some sort of scientists, in order to make a stop, relax and observe silently all situations in their developing.

It happens frequently that programs such as Google Analytics or Lloogg produce statistics in defect respect to the ones produced by your server.

Photo Credit: AnaBGD

Fake visitors

The reason is very simple: the programs of web analytics that monitor the accesses reading the log files of the web server (as awstats for instance) erroneously evaluate like visits many contacts that are not.

Here a list of false positive that can wreck the web stats:

XML engines

When you submit your feed into XML aggregators, a bot check your feed for updates frequently. Feedburner, for exaple, works this way: more your site is up to date, more it comes frequently producing a lot of access logs which could be confused with real visitors, but it are not.

Spiders

It’s the same for search engines spiders that index your web pages. Some times it are so intrusive that can bring your server to crash.

Trackback spammers

This is one of the most common causes of false positive.

If your blog support trackback it is subject to be spammed. In fact spam bots continuously call the trackback script trying to insert some links.

Some of these bot are able even to modify its referring IP every time they call the script, and could therefore be seen as various visitors.

Comments spam

It is the same for the comments; bot continuously try to insert fake comments with links inside calling the script and generating a new log each time. Each log line can be confused with a visitor.

How to get perfect web statistics

In few words, it is not possible to get an affordable idea about web traffic using just a log analytics application.

It would be better to use an outside application, which makes use of JavaScript to track the visits on the content pages (I recommend LLOOGG, i have some invitations), and make comparison with the stats produced by your web server.

In this way attempts of spam on trackback or comments script will be ignored, and the visit counter will increase just when JavaScript will be executed on the content pages.

In any case you will never have perfect stats, but you will be able to have a more reliable idea about the real traffic of your blog.