The Knitting Fiend

As some of you know, I recently mentioned that according to “Compete” a supposedly objective traffic measuring tool, I am as popular as The Yarn Harlot and strangely, supposedly slightly more popular than Wendy. Now… as it happens, I don’t believe this. In fact, the idea is rolling on the floor laughable.

I know these two knitters are wildly popular. Plus, I had, in the past, seen direct evidence of the popularity of The Yarn Harlot. She once mentioned my button hole calculator at her blog, and let’s just say… well…you can read my reaction here.

Anyway, Wendy saw my trackback, visited and commented on my post. We chitchatted back and forth. I mentioned my sockulators and my links (which are a major source of traffic for me.) Anyway, since Wendy was blogging about knitting socks today, Wendy, The Mega-Powerful Knitting Blogger (with a very cute cat named after me Lucy) wrote this somewhere in the middle of her blog post:

Speaking of Socks
Do y’all know about all the great sock resources over at Lucia’s blog, The Knitting Fiend? There are patterns, tips, tricks, and calculators. Lots of great sock resources!

She posted at 5:44pm Eastern Time. It’s now 5:09 Eastern time. So, wanna’ know how many hits I got so far?

1 http://my4.statcounter.com/pro…amefrom.php?project_id=1355365
2 http://www.wendyknits.net/
3 http://wendyknits.net/
4 http://wendyknits.net/
5 http://www.google.com/search?h…tting blogs&btnG=Google Search
6 http://wendyknits.net/archives/001221.html
7 http://wendyknits.net/
8 http://www.bloglines.com/myblo…play?sub=34251423&site=1075769
9 http://wendyknits.net/
10 http://www.stumbleupon.com/ref…hedietdiary.com/blog/lucia/523
11 http://www.ask.com/web?q=knitting fiend blog&qsrc=0&o=0&l=dir
12 http://wendyknits.net/
13 http://groups.yahoo.com/group/magicloop/message/7361
14 http://wendyknits.net/
15 http://wendyknits.net/
16 http://search.msn.com/results….hawl patterns&src=IE-SearchBox
17 http://wendyknits.net/
18 http:// www.wendyknits.net/
19 http://wendyknits.net/
20 http://wendyknits.net/
21 http://wendyknits.net/
22 http://wendyknits.net/index.html
23 http://wendyknits.net/
24 http://www.wendyknits.net/
25 unknown
26 http://www.diaperpin.com/forum04/topic.asp?TOPIC_ID=154696
27 http://wendyknits.net/
28 http://www.wendyknits.net/
29 http://www.wendyknits.net/
30 http://www.google.com/search?q…rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official
31 http://search.yahoo.com/search…nfonia knitting pattern&fspl=1
32 http://images.google.com/imgre…v=/images%3Fq%3Dhow%2Bto%2Bset
33 http://wendyknits.net/
34 http://wendyknits.net/
35 unknown
36 http://www.wendyknits.net
37 unknown
38 http://www.google.com/search?h…floor mats &btnG=Google Search
39 http://www.google.com/search?hl=en
40 http://www.google.com/search?q…icrosoft:en-US&ie=utf8&oe=utf8
41 http://wendyknits.net/
42 http://wendyknits.net/
43 http://kimrue.typepad.com/knitterama/
44 http://www.wendyknits.net/
45 http://www.wendyknits.net/
46 http://www.wendyknits.net/
47 http://www.google.com/search?s…:en&q=knit front back front%3f
48 http://wendyknits.net/
49 http://wendyknits.net/

Now, you’ve got to figure, that at most 10% of Wendy’s visitors click that link. And they can’t all visit within 15 minutes of her posting. So… if roughly 40 visited me in 15 minutes… that means… How many knitters visit that Wendy’s site?!

Update (Friday Morning):
This is the effect after two days. One link from Wendy increased my traffic by roughly 500 unique visits on both Wed. and Thursday. (Wendy looked at her daily hits, and she appears to get 30 to 40 times the traffic I get.) Let me assure you, no matter what Compete, the “objective” third party traffic tracking system says, I do not get as many visitors as Wendy Knits or The Yarn Harlot!

But you knew that, right?

Top five knitting blogs
as ranked by the google bot.
Does no one visit?

Knitting Blogs

This is really weird! Really weird! The “objective” graph above supposedly says I get almost as much traffic as The Yarn Harlot. In fact, near Christmas, I got more!

As it happens, I know The Yarn Harlot gets more traffic than I do. How do I know? Well, she linked me once, and when visitors clicked on the link, I got more traffic in two hours than I normally get in a day!

Still, believe it or not, advertisers supposedly use these sorts of compete snapshots to figure out how much to pay a blog when they run an ad.

Oh well… (And in case you are wondering, I have done nothing to boost my rank at this service. I didn’t even know compete existed until yesterday. In case your wondering further, yesterday I installed a “compete” toolbar in Firefox, which might boost it a little. )

Ok, so how did I find this ranking service? As many of you know, I periodically check my blog rank, metrics and all the other things that bloggers are all supposed to pretend they don’t care about. I rarely post to brag about it, because the results of checking is usually demoralizing. (My google page rank dropped yesterday. Sigh. . . )

Anyway, since I am an obsessed link and traffic whore, naturally, I found the “Compete” site and their snapshot service. I then googled “Knitting Blogs” and entered the top sites. (Well, most of the top sites. When I tried to check Joe’s traffic, I found Compete won’t report traffic for individual blogger blogs.)

Anyway, I entered these knitting blogs: The Yarn Harlot, Wendy Knits, Mason Dixon Knitting, Knit Sisters to see how their traffic compares to mine.

Then I looked at the graph and “Whoa!” “The Knitting Fiend” supposedly gets more traffic than most of those other knitting blogs! Yet, those blogs actually get hundreds of comments a post, sell books and some of the authors tour the country.

I must be “the unknown nameless faceless mega knitting blogger!”

(Oh, if you click the image, you’ll arrive at Compete’s site. If you can “compare”– if that’s the right word– blog traffic for any blogs you like. Then return and report back! We want to know if you get more traffic than The Yarn Harlot!

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Wendy noticed I was tracking an incorrect URL for her site. I’ve corrected. So, at least now Compete shows she gets some visitors. (We all knew this though!)

I was visiting Cass Knits and she described a way I could bribe reward people to post comments. I’d like more comments, so I implemented the trick. From now on, if knitters (or anyone) post comments on any of my posts, Google will “count” the link and increase the page rank of your knitting blog.

Cass also provide a list of other Wordpress blogs that have instituted the trick, and if you visit their blogs, and comment, you can improve your page rank even more! (Wow!)

What’s the scheme? It’s called joining the D List. There are basically two steps: (more…)