blogger stats

I was all proud of myself a few months ago because I had cracked six figures in pageviews. My pageview count had been going steadily upward over the last two years or so, and I was getting a consistent base count.

Then I logged onto statcounter and found that my pageview numbers for the last month were one fifth of those for blogger. When I looked into my stats for blogger, my counts were wildly inflated by hits from two unrelated blogs (which shall remain nameless) which have ramped up to be the majority of my web traffic. I looked at those two blogs, and all of the posts have a long list of enraged comments bashing them for messing with other bloggers' stats.

The problem for me is that all these non-pageviews overwhelm my actual readership and I can't see where my traffic is coming from: am I getting new readers from some new blog-aggregator, or did I spark a debate elsewhere?

Since I don't have ads here, my interest in blog metrics is purely academic. But given the apparent manipulation of blog metrics (and the fact that the starting point for this blog continues to stretch backward in time and is now 2006, according to my stats page), I guess I'm going to be relying on statcounter more to keep track of things.