How to tell if someone is linking to you, Part 3
In the last two posts I’ve been talking about how bloggers know if someone is linking to them. To recap: There are 4 main ways:
1. email
2. Trackbacks
3. Blog watches/search engines
4. Referrer logs from stats
Read part 1 and part 2 for full details on items 1-3; today I’m going to talk about referrer logs.
4. Referrer logs
Referrer logs are one type of statistic you can collect about the traffic that comes to your blog. There’s a lot of different types of info you can collect – new vs. returning users (if they’ve accepted a cookie), pages viewed, pages they entered on, pages they left, type of browser (called a user agent in stat-speak).
Different blogging applications have different ways of displaying this info, and some don’t collect it at all, like Blogger. But there are work-arounds so that even Blogger users can collect some stats – if they’re willing to tweak the blog template a bit.
Here’s an example from my referrer log (click on the picture to see a full-size version):
What this means is that a) the pages on this list have a link somewhere to this blog and, b) someone came from that page to land here.
I find this stuff fascinating, but then, it is my blog!
The link from Naked Conversations is from a trackback to a post where I mentioned Shel Israel. That’s how trackbacks work. The link from David Newberger’s blog, The Geek Guy Rants, is from a comment I made on his blog.
The search links are interesting – I looked at the food blog search someone made and saw that CTBizBlogs was #2 on the list, for a post about the Central CT Women’s Forum. I mentioned the word “food” once, yet apparently the combination of that along with “blog” and “ct” was enough to boost me in the Google search. Too bad I’m not a food blog – I’d be thrilled about that result! But it does show you the power of blogs in search engine ranking.
The link from a Washington Post blog is due to the post I wrote about Achenblog. One of his many readers wrote a comment about pages which linked to the blog. (I had to search pretty far to find it, I’ll admit. Thank goodness for the Edit/Find menu item on browsers!)
Here’s what I found:
Some folks there checked me out. One very kindly commented that “The ctbizblog (Yeah, Connecticut!) had the best write-up on Joel and the Boodle, in my opinion.” Thanks!
Of course, now I’ve linked to a post which has a comment with a link to a post where I linked to the blog. Sometimes the blogosphere can be like an echo chamber.
Because I host my WordPress blog, I easily added a “plug-in” for statistics, BAStats. There are many others. One thing I like about WordPress is the availability of plug-ins to enhance it, and the ease with which plug-ins can be added.
If you’re using Blogger, it’s a bit trickier. But you can add a stat package if you’re willing to tamper with the template, or know someone who does.
What I like about referrer logs, as opposed to just looking at backlinks, is that it tells me where someone came from who actually clicked on a link.
In the past few days, I’ve read some excellent posts about different stat packages that include referrer logs. If you’re interested, I’d highly recommend reading these articles:
- Problogger’s Blog Statistics Packages
- Performancing’s Blog Stats Software Reviews - Introduction
There are many ways to find out who’s linking to you – if you’re serious about blogging and networking, you’ll use as many of them as you can.
![email address: ctbizblogs [at] gmail.com](http://www.ctbizblogs.com/wp-images/email.png)
