Luthiery Laboratories

Since Gargle keeps track of everything, I like to keep track of them. So I added some 'instrumentation' (code) to the site to keep track of when and where their 'spider' comes snooping through. And I was shocked. Even as I was writing the code, I started collecting hits from Gargle, and quite a few. In fact, they seem to be in here every few minutes !

That's good and bad. The good is that I'm getting a lot of love from Gargle. The bad is that a lot of the hits I have recorded are probably bots, not people. Alas. Of course, I long ago made sure I don't count myself.

So I made some changes to catch bots and prevent them from incrementing the counters. I can't catch them all, but I figure I can catch at least 90% without too much trouble. Then I reset all the counters to 0 to get a new accurate count of the (mostly) human traffic on the site. I hope I'm not disappointed.

Gargle is the only search engine I really give a damn about, Bjng is a distant second, and the rest don't matter to me at all. All of this works within the existing database structure and programming framework of WordPress, and integrates seamlessly with the back-end, and also the front end, if you are me.

As I was writing this post, Gargle hit two more pages. That's respect !

Wait, that's the wrong song! Here's the right one:

The Blues Brothers can stay anyway, and that's twice as much Aretha.

Update:

Gargle spiders about 40 pages a day. I was not expecting that kind of attention. At that rate, Gargle re-indexes the entire site roughly every week. Bjng copies Gargle, so I would expect the same results there. But nobody uses Bjng. Yaboo is dead, and I don't care about the foreign search engines.

I think I have figured out why as well. If Gargle spiders a page and finds it has not changed, it loses interest. The pages here are constantly changing, just slightly. Every time I make a new post or edit an old one, it automatically alters the menus on every page. This must be just enough to keep Gargle's interest, even though the actual content has not changed. On another site that uses the same setup but is basically static, Gargle only hit the home page in the same period.

Also, I don't wait for Gargle to stumble by and find new pages and changes on their own. WordPress can now generate xml sitemaps which tell Gargle about recent changes. I've been able to do that for years, they finally caught up to me. I disabled my old code in favor of the new native functionality, but I retained my automatic submission of the sitemaps. WordPress does not do this, which kind-of defeats the whole purpose.

On a site that is not WordPress, I have a year's worth of referrer data, but it is all garbage, so I am not going to bother trying to track that here. The only inbound links that really matter are Gargle. And I am crushing that - most relevant Gargle searches place this site on page one, and often the very first result !!! I am also crushing the image search. It is very important to give your images relevant file names. That seems to be the only thing Gargle goes by.

So there's your free SEO lesson for today.