I have a hunch, but I wonder if anybody knows for sure ... how does a post on usenet made through Google Groups show up in your referrer logs? It seems like it shouldn't matter how it was posted, it's how people on the other end of the wire see it, but I think the opposite is happening.

Mine is a photography site, so I've posted a few images to rec.photo.digital, and Google seems to be sending me a lot more traffic than I'd expect. They're always the #1 search engine, but now it's by a factor of seven or eight times over. I'm seeing this in Awstats and Google Analytics. ( As long as I'm asking questions, does anyone else ever see "transferring data from google-analytics.com" waiting for your page to load? )

To confirm the "build it and they will come" theory, I posted a photo ( "Olympic Nightfall" ) to a usenet forum devoted to photography, and overnight about 40 people came to my site through stumble upon. When I click them in my referrer log, they tell me I can advertise through their service, but honestly, I'm not selling anything, so I can't see paying to advertise.

I have no idea. But do you see usenet anywhere in your logs? You might have to look through all of them if your stats show you something like the top 10.

sounds like "referer spam"

Where some one (or bot) will visit your site and leave a log entry with a faked referer (often with an affiliate ID) in the hope that;

1: Your logs are public and they get a link and people or SEs find it and visit.

2: You visit the link so they get a clickthrough.

I have a database full of referer spammers/scrapers and some code to kick them straight off site.

and just to add

Very many of these "non" referers often come from the "home pages" of the new directories as seen in the "Submit to my Directory" forum

Make what you will of that!!!

Originally Posted by chrishirst

sounds like "referer spam"

Where some one (or bot) will visit your site and leave a log entry with a faked referer (often with an affiliate ID) in the hope that;

1: Your logs are public and they get a link and people or SEs find it and visit.

Out of curiosity, do people actually publish their raw logs like that? Seems like a bad idea on so many different levels! Forget giving out valuable info to your competitors, and all of that, there probably isn't much to gain from this?

I guess they must, though, if people target a specific type of spam.

A lot do have public logs, often without knowing it

Analog and AWStats as a standard setting did not secure the log webaccess pages so the info would often be publicly accessible at hostname\logs\
And of course blogs often show "last referers" or "top referers"

Good to know! I'm using awestats, so I just checked any my \logs\ URL returns a 404. Also the design on my 404 page is hideously out of date. I learned two things today; I'm going to take tomorrow off!

I'm seeing plenty of referral spam ( porn sites, celebrity gossip, espn ), always one hit on an html page w/o wanting the CSS or images. But I get the impression everybody gets that, and there isn't much that can be done about it.

What I'm trying to figure out is how clicks from a posting through Google Groups to rec.photo.digital would look in the referral logs? This month I've had about 600 visitors from Google, 100 from MSN, and 70 or 80 from Yahoo. Normally Google is more like 3:1, so I'm guessing a lot of usenet people clicked a link to my photo, but they're showing "Google" as the referrer ... does that sound reasonable? Or would it have to show up differently, and there are few enough that it doesn't show on my summary report?

I've been doing a lot of work on my web site lately, by hand because I broke my DW template, and I've spent a lot of time cleaning up messy html. Improving the design, making some of the javascript more useable, changing <p class="h2"> to <h2>, things like that. So I've been trying to use the search traffic as a rough guide to how much SEO effect this has. I've been at it for two weeks ( have had to redo every image on the site, still not finished ). I'm mainly doing this for non-SEO reasons, but I'm also getting burnt out, and it would be great to think the extra traffic I'm seeing under Google's column is a payoff for this html work.

It could simply be that this is the month you started to get more traffic from Google. Maybe that one extra link or one more month being online got them to trust you more.

They also seem to have tweaked the algorithm a bit recently so if the traffic is coming in the last week or so it could be from that.

Do you see a separate listing for search traffic through Google Images. I would think you could get a lot of traffic through the image search given the nature of your site.

If you're not seeing image search traffic try being more descriptive in your alt attributes on the images. I think you may also get a boost in the image search based on the text near the image. Also make sure to give the images meaningful names.

I just took a look at your home page and I see the image with the file name:

SeattleFromThePier.jpg

Search engines will see that as one word so a better filename would be:

seattle-from-the-pier.jpg

The lower case is just my preference, but do use dashes between the words. Also I see the alt text for that image as:

alt="Skyline from the Pier"

make it

alt="Seattle Skyline from the Pier"

or even better name the pier if it has a name.

I'm not sure if the search engines would prefer to see the images as the source instead of as the background image, but I understand why you have it coded that way.

I do think changing the file names and improving on the alt text alone will get you more image search traffic. I might also add a little more descriptive text on the page with the larger image.

I'd also use the dashes in your urls, but changing them now would mean you'd need to 301 redirect to the new urls from the current ones.

None of these things are major, but if you get in the habit of naming files, folders, etc in a search friendly way you'll probably pick up more search traffic for what amounts to little to no work.

Originally Posted by vangogh

Do you see a separate listing for search traffic through Google Images. I would think you could get a lot of traffic through the image search given the nature of your site.

Actually, yeah, Google Images is the #2 search engine sending me traffic, almost 50% more than MSN. In Webmaster Tools I turned on their enhanced image search, letting them let people add tags to my images.

Originally Posted by vangogh

I'm not sure if the search engines would prefer to see the images as the source instead of as the background image, but I understand why you have it coded that way.

This is something that hadn't even occurred to me. That's a good question. Hopefully the urls being on the page instead of buried in an external stylesheet will help, but on the other hand, I really want people to find the pages with the images, instead of the jpeg itself. But I'll have to start paying attention and make sure these pages don't drop out of the results. Thanks for pointing this out!

Originally Posted by vangogh

I do think changing the file names and improving on the alt text alone will get you more image search traffic. I might also add a little more descriptive text on the page with the larger image.

I've been working on more descriptive text, but that's slow. Sometimes I'll do this when I fix the rest of the page, but most of them I'm planning to come back when the new design is flushed out.

The jpegs would be easy to rename, the pages would be more work. But aren't hyphens in the URLs kind of user unfriendly?

Originally Posted by vangogh

None of these things are major, but if you get in the habit of naming files, folders, etc in a search friendly way you'll probably pick up more search traffic for what amounts to little to no work.

Yeah, that describes how I feel about SEO in general. It's one of the lesser considerations, but it's a good thing to have in the back of your mind, and makes a great tie-breaker.

Thanks for the wonderful advice...!

I don't think the hyphens are unfriendly. Most people aren't going to type those urls directly, but if they do it's unlikely they'd be going on memory for the full url.

I think it could be considered unfriendly in the domain since there people may be typing directly based on you having told them the domain the day before. That's where having dashes between words could be unfriendly, but I think in the file names its fine.

Photoshop's "Save for Web" feature turns spaces in the file name into hyphens, and I've always been annoyed with it. I guess I can't really put my finger on a good reason, though. Maybe it's just habit from writing too much C# code. A lot of sites do this, maybe I should give it a try.

I've been going through and adding more descriptive alt tags throughout my gallery pages. I'm starting to think a CMS of some kind might be a good idea for the individual photo pages, there are just so many of them.

After looking through my referral logs I can't see anything that looks like a lot of usenet traffic, unless each click looks different. So I'm not sure how much of the Google traffic to attribute to search. But it's been growing every month, so that's a good thing.