My thoughts about my recent blog on fake award badges (of which Fookem & Bug finally removed their questionable "Top Blog" award badge) turned me to thinking about the Deaf Bilingual Coalition's website. I couldn't help but noticed DBC's visitor hit counter prominently shown near the top of their website. The number I saw just a few minutes ago had a hit count of 2,495,575 hits. That got me thinking. That number literally does not add up since I know that DBC website first went up in late spring or summer of 2008 using the Archive.org site to ascertain the initial date of that website going public. And with my curiousity piqued I did a little investigation.
I used Google's search engine to use its cache feature to see what was the visitor count according to Google's last "snapshot" of that website. The Google cache captured the DBC website on August 31, 2010 showed a hit counter at 2,489,421. That's 6 days apart from Google cache record to today's count with a difference of 6,154 hits. Assuming this counter is true in over 6 days worth that's about 1,000 hits a day. Even this number might be questionable as well when compared to my website where I normally get anywhere from 400 to 800 hits a day.
Using the Alexa traffic rank website my website has a traffic rank of 3,894,629 (as of September 2010) while the DBC website has a traffic rank of 14,204,188. My blogsite is almost 7 years old with over 800,000 hits. But DBC is about 2 years old with supposedly 2,495,575 hits yet it ranks much lower than mine? With 2,495,575 hits in 2 years that's the equivalent of 104,000 hits a month yet in six days it racked up about 6,000 hits (assuming this is even true) which would leave about 30,000 hits in a month. Supposing the "2,495,575 hits" is true then certainly Alexa's website would've easily shown that.
This analysis of mine has nothing to do with who has the bigger number of hits. That's besides point here. It's about the obvious discrepancies I am seeing with DBC's own visitor counter number. And frankly, my conclusion is that whoever put that counter up with the high hits isn't being honest.
Monday, September 06, 2010
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21 comments:
Nobody is trying to be dishonest, Mike. The issue was already brought up, but many other matters have been a higher priority in the meantime.
It is dishonest if the number of hits isn't factual but highly exaggerated. It also points out the willingness of such an organization to be dishonest by falsely portraying its website as an active one in the effort to somehow "legitimize" its organization's standing with false number of visit hits.
Keep digging that hole.
Dishonesty. This is the only thing DBc folks understand. It's been like that since day one.
Seeing Brain here defending DBC spoke in volumes. That pretty much sums it up for me.
Is DBC using and voluming on the odometer to cheat on us and the viewers?
Perhaps so.....
Wow , I checked out few sites
http://web.archive.org/web/*/http://www.dbcusa.org/
http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/dbcusa.org#
I would suggest DBC to give us some good explainations why they doing this ?
Have a good day !
GoatMan aka Travis
I raised the issue of 'hits' with deaf.read recently after being told the 80,000 I had were probably done by scam bots and other trawling areas that try to pick up information from posts and blogs, deaf.read claims you can only log in once to view a site (The hit) and the second or more times do not count. I was reliably informed hits can be via remote and come from many other areas, perhaps 'official' sites get more passing 'hits' than others, or maybe they do not prevent multiple hits by the same people being recorded only once, it is difficult to know if your site is well viewed or just a prime or easy target for spy bots. It would need someone with more technical savvy than me.
YOURE the one with the balls to comment on that? I remember when Ridor busted you doing the same on Deafread! And that was intentional!
Anonymous,
You're confused. He was challenging me on the highest number of hits I received in a single hour where I once received over 1300 hits. I believed it was the highest one day hourly He said his were higher but offered no proof when I have.
You can read about it here.
MM,
I've never seen scambots give out so much hits like that, at least not from I can see in my Sitemeter and Blogger stats page.
What I've learned out over the years is that the more materials I put out in my blog the more hits I get from people Googling for answers. Since there are over 1560 posts in my Kokonut Pundit from American politics, deaf issues, Snoped rattlesnake size, Matt Hamill (for example, I get a lot of hits whenever Matt Hamill fights people looking him up since I have several blog interviews of him, I'm even referenced in a Wikipedia on Matt Hamill) to environmental science I get all kinds of Google hits each day constantly.
I've gone much higher now on weekly hits than I have before with help of Deafread, Deafvillage, Twitter and Google lookups (and some Bing lookups but Google is king and I get a lot of that!). For example, I added in Twitter that helped increase my traffic by almost 10%. Over the last two years or so on cumulative hits I've seen it grow. I typically get anywhere from 6,000 to 10,000 hits a week. Not much. A big surprise is that people keep finding my blog about the Snoped world's largest rattlesnake where I did my analysis there using the existing photo and proving that photo of that snake cannot be 15ft long. I get anywhere from 10 to 60 hits a day whenever there's news about some rattlesnake do people land on my particular Snoped rattlesnake page.
http://kokonutpundits.blogspot.com/2006/01/snoped-rattlesnake.html
It was interesting to watch how my readerships and blogs evolved over the last 2 to 3 years on the variety of topics I wrote.
It's not the hits but the blogs I've produced that I'm particular fond of. I just enjoy writing alot. And get the satisfaction that people do enjoy my blogs.
Brian Riley wrote:
"Nobody is trying to be dishonest, Mike. The issue was already brought up, but many other matters have been a higher priority in the meantime."
The misleading hit-counter became a "higher priority" once KokonutPundit blogged about it.
Is being transparently honest a low priority for DBC leaders?
Is misleading the public a "higher priority" for DBC leaders?
Why did DBC leaders wait until KokonutPundit's blog posting to fix the misleading hit-counter?
Personally I am not interested in hits, it's just a view I put, if I got a 100 it would be a record lol if I wanted to go for it hit-wise, I'd be more 'commercial' with deaf issues, learn some ASL, and join the mindless masses on FB or Twitter, but I subscribe to neither, I have a life really, and abhor social sites, because they are full of stalkers and ID theft merchants, and I have an clinical aversion to trivia. As I post on an American site the chances of a wider viewing are remote anyway if I post UK related stuff. Typical Brit response when I mentioned I had 80K hits was RUBBISH ! they didn't believe a word of it...
"BEA"
In the "ancient page" department on Site Meter's Entry Page I see several hits to 2005, 2006, 2007 and 2008 articles. For some reasons I'm getting a lot of hits on the Peter Jennings smoking page which was written up in 2005.
http://kokonutpundits.blogspot.com/2005/08/peter-jennings-smokingrevisted.html
Probably some recent news about lung cancer and Peter Jennings that is causing people to Google some more information up. Things like that. Go back and read some of my earlier blogs that were NOT deaf-related. I'd say about 30% of my hits land on the "ancient pages" via Google searches.
As for the CAA, how can I "allow" the CAA to answer Valhallian's questions? Tell me. How? They already know they can reply in my blog comment area. Instead, the prefer that any questions be referred through the CAA's contact page.
Lastly, I blog/write alot. Always have. Not about covering up "made up scandals." Exactly how many scandals are you talking about?
But hey, if the DBC want the world to think it has 2.4 million visitors/hits in 2 years and the fact that it doesn't even register on the Alexa.com analytic page...sure..go ahead and pretend that the high number equates a legitimate and active website. It's like putting up a fake "Top Blog" badge award on your blog/website when in actuality it's a fake and doesn't really bring any real credibility to it. Once you understand the real agenda behind the badge and how it connects to a spam website hocking medical assistant schooling deals then you know why.
Don't hit counters typically record a hit for each page within the site that was visited?
Most people visiting Mike's site aren't doing much visiting of ancient pages, whereas DBC's website, dbcusa.org has many subpages to visit, so it's unsurprising that it would have many hits.
Hit counters and what they really mean have been discussed to death already. Mike's distrust of DBC has led him to doubt its counter's accuracy more than DBC's counter has led him to distrust DBC.
While we're talking about dishonesty, let's take a look at:
http://web.archive.org/web/*/http://www.imdeaf.com
(edited by Kokonut)
Chasing THAT dishonesty down should keep you busy for a while with a REAL scandal, instead of all the little trivial distractors you're coming up with to try to tar your opponents.
That, or you could allow the CAA to answer Valhallian's questions...
Funny how Mike's made-up scandals and accusations also help folks forget that he's posted a flurry of blogs since that important batch of unanswered questions.
B.E.A.
"BEA"
Don't give out names of persons claiming that they made money off of scams unless you have proof. And the reason why I edited that portion out of your response. The rest of your comment I left intact.
When I said "names" I meant using Deaf people names.
B.E.A.:
Did Brian Riley state, "Most people visiting Mike's site aren't doing much visiting of ancient pages, whereas DBC's website, dbcusa.org has many subpages to visit, so it's unsurprising that it would have many hits"?
He did not.
The DBC web site REMOVED the hits-counter widget in question.
Brian Riley acknowledged - through a comment here at KokonutPundit's blog and via the fact the hits-counter widget was immediately removed from his DBC web site - that there was and is an "issue" related to a hits-counter widget that was not functioning properly.
The question is if a simple hits-counter widget wasn't removed to purposefully mislead visitors of DBCUSA.org into mistakenly believing DBCusa.org was a highly popular, and thus, credible web site.
Brian Riley stated, "The issue was already brought up."
Brian Riley admitted the DBC leadership failed to address the issue.
KokonutPundit brought up an issue that was already brought up (as Brian Riley wrote, "The issue was already brought up"), and as a result, the DBC REMOVED the "issue" - the hits-counter widget in question.
Is the DBC trying to use the Peacock Effect to look bigger than they really are?
Just checked http://www.dbcusa.org/
Hit counter looks still to be there and functioning.
Is Barry spitting Peacock feathers again because he misunderstood what was REALLY going on?
AGAIN?
Mike, have you consider the possibility that hearing students from several universities and colleges, studying deaf culture, deaf education, speech/communication, interpreting, and the likes, might be frequently visit the DBC website over the years? They may doing research or homework assignment based on Google keywords: deaf and bilingual, perhaps when they see and click on the DBC site, thinking it might help them somehow education-wise? Type in "deaf, bilingual" and check out the first two results of Google search.
That may be how the DBC website get so many visitors daily.
No, Rob. Not even feasible. DBC website is ranked at 14 million.
Look at the Transgriot blog. On August 27, 2010:
"At 10:54 PM CDT the 1.5 millionth visitor surfed over to my blog since I installed the hit counter on January 17, 2007."
http://transgriot.blogspot.com/2010/08/15-million-hits.html
That blog was 3.5 years old when it hit the 1.5 million mark and is ranked at 606,000 globally by Alexa.
http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/transgriot.blogspot.com#
Plus you can see the graph results, too.
Put in http://www.dbcusa.org/ into the "Compare Transgriot to:" box and you will see DBC's flatlining below Transgriot's graph result.
DBC's website is ranked over 14,000,000 globally and it is barely 2 years old. It does't rank high enough (the lower the rank the better you are) to even warrant a graphing result by itself.
Understand now, Rob?
I see what you mean, Mike. However, I'm not seeing any graph chart results in one month or other time. I see this message on the chart: "Historical data not available for sites ranked >100,000".
Is there something we're not just seeing here about DBC site getting so many hits? Spambots? Visitorbots?
Rob,
DBC is not getting those hits. Their traffic rank is 14 at over 14,200,000based on average daily visitors. Meaning the rest of the 14,200,000 (better traffic ranking) have more daily visitors than DBC's. My traffic rank is at around 3 million and I have over 800,000 hits.
There are no visitorbots pr spambots to cause an increase in hits.
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