about the stats

a cursory analysis of the stats provided free of charge by google tells me that although i may (likely will) continue imagining growing throngs of avid readers caring about me and hanging on my every word, the increasing numbers over the past months are false, not real people, and meaningless computer code attacks, spams, glitches, or whatever, ultimately, not readers, not people... this makes those of you reading who are people all the more valuable to me, so thank you... thank you much more than words can say...

this is what i learned about the stats today...

this youtube video shows up as the referral page more often than any other (44 referrals in the past week) and yet my blog is not linked on the page... and this blog is not alone... some code is recording the page as a referral page in a lot of blogs... the uploader denies doing it, but will not remove it, which is not showing consideration to the upset bloggers probably because he is making money because bloggers are going to the reference link to find out why the video is showing up as the referral site so often... this shows the fallacy, inconsistency, and simply, meaninglessness of the google stats) or google analytics, as they seem to proudly call it)... this youtube page linked above is the only page listed as a referral site for the day and has a count of 9 referrals or "traffic sources" from Sep 11, 2012 3:00 AM to Sep 12, 2012 2:00 AM, yet the "audience" page suggests that more than 40 page visits were recorded from Russia, a few from Romania and Germany... and yet the top ten pages visited span several years and have a total of 11 visits, suggesting random page visits are being recorded... makes no sense and the rest of the stats make even less sense...

and this particular youtube video page replaces others that were doing the same thing, showing up as referring pages and they are even more unrelated and random... see for yourself (but be aware, a couple are porn and they may no longer be there as these spam-referrers seem to disappear after a while, but somehow this blog got on their radar in late june of this year)... note i removed links cuz they might be threats... take this good advice if you are finding lots of visitors from specific sites you don't know to your blog(s)... here is google's take on it...

some referrals are coming from links i put out there in my own other blogs (and these are diminishing which leads me to believe they may have been largely me clicking through testing links or something... they are not updated often, in fact, three were not updated in quite some time, but here at least i know the referring sites are not spamming...

back door
stumblr
myspace blog
behind the candoor
so what do the stats tell us?... not much... besides the obvious that there is not enough information or filtering capability to give the data much tangible value, to be repetitious in an attempt to make sense of the numbers google provides, they suggest that today (past 24 hours) there were 19 page views from 9 referrals from one site... yet the audience page says there were more than 40 views from one country along and other views from other countries... apples and oranges or simply errors, the numbers do not match... the top ten pages visited cover a span of years and they only account for 11 of those page views, suggesting the page views are quite random and further this suggests that most of the page views are not people viewing the page, but rather some statistical anomalies and false views created by some scripts or codes distorting and falsifying google stats... ah, even accepting that i, like young skywalker, or grasshopper, for that matter, have much to learn, i still wonder why anyone would actually pay google for such stats is yet another proof that corporate marketing can sell anything... perhaps someone could explain... perhaps google could... i welcome anyone who can make sense of the stats cuz i love stats, but the simplest of analysis shows me they are invalid and stats that cannot be validated are a meaningless waste of time...

but as i said and will say again and again because it is the most important point and reason of all outside of maintaining my sanity (and there is hope, i hope), this makes those of you reading who are actual people all the more valuable and meaningful and important to me, so thank you again... thank you much more than words can say...