Thank you! Second most popular South African blog in religion
Thursday, September 16, 2010 at 7:48PM 
The Mail & Guardian newspaper runs a service called Amatomu that ranks blogs and websites on various criteria. One of the metrics is the number of visitors to a blog.
Among the top blogs in South Africa are friends such as Steve Hayes' Khanya blog (which is a far better blog than mine!), my friend Gus' Church blog (Paarl Methodist Church), Mark Penrith's very popular 'Because He lives', Roger Saner's Future Church blog (also a favourite), and then there's Stephen Murray's blog - perhaps one of the best designed blogs among us, and Thomas Scarborough's "Urban Ministry Live" blog.
I'm pleased to say that Mark, Steve and Stephen are also members of the Lausanne Blogger Network!
However, your visits have placed my blogs at numbers 2 and number 15 respectively in South Africa. Thank you for looking in from time to time, moreover, I am grateful that you interact with the content that I post (I realize that some of it is rather eclectic!). This blog - An uncommon path - actually gets more hits than Dion's Random Ramblings. However, it is listed 13 places lower on the ranking. The list can be a little flaky at times (I have seen with a few blogs that they often get stuck at the point where the amatomu.com code loads... So, I removed the code from this blog for a few weeks. I have since discovered that it is better to use the non-java version of the tracker code. That seems to have sorted the problem out!)
I have had both of my blogs in the top 5 a few times, and Dion's Random Ramblings has been at number 1 a few times. I'm not sure how accurate the statistics are (as I said above), but it is great to be able to give the blog some validation as a source of religious (and particularly Christian) interest in South Africa.
How many visitors do I get per day?
Well, I normally get around 250-300 visitors a day to each blog. This blog has gone as high as 1500 visitors a day - depending on the topic of my post and its relationship to a particular event in the news.
If you have any suggestions for improving both the content, and making it easier for you to interact with me and the content, then please leave a comment below or drop me an email. I would love to hear from you!
I know that I break some cardinal 'blogger rules' by not posting only within a single genre, writing posts that are a little too long, and not posting enough 'link bait'. But, my blog is a fun and personal space! It reflects my life and thoughts...
God bless,
Dion
Dr Dion Forster
Well, it seems that the 'non-java' version of the amatomu.com code that I am using for my blog ranking works better than the previous 'java' code.
As of today (Sunday 19 September 2010, which is less than a week after the original post above) this blog has climbed 8 places from 15 to 7. It may soon be back in the top 5.
One of the questions I was asked was how my other blog (Dion's random ramblings) could still be so popular even though I no longer post to it. As one person rightly pointed out, when they don't update their blog for a while it looses popularity.
Indeed, that is often the case when your blog visits are from a regular group of persons who navigate to your blog to view your content. However, search engine optimization does account for a large number of the visitors to that blog. By this I mean, Google ranks a blog based on how many successful searches terminate to that blog (i.e., when people search for a topic, your blog is listed as an option, and it gets clicked - your blog's prominence is increased by google and you rank higher on the search page). Another element that makes your blog more prominent is the length of time that it has existed (older blogs with higher terminated searches rank higher than new blogs with higher traffic). Since this blog has been running since 2005 it has had years and years of terminated search traffic to make it a popular blog.
Let me list an example of this. But, first let me give a caveat. You may notice from some earlier posts that I follow a discipline of not 'googling' my name or my posts. It may sound silly, but I don't really want to get sucked into responding to what will get me a higher ranking or more popular ranking on google etc.,
However, that being said I was alerted some time ago that my first name 'Dion' ranks on the first page of google when it is searched for. Now, that is quite remarkable since there are some very famous Dion's in the world (Celine Dion, Dion diMucci etc.) Yet, if you search for 'Dion' my name will appear on the first page of google in the top 5 ranked pages for that name. In truth I am not a person of any kind of consequence, I certainly have no public profile, yet there it is... And of course the reason is that the page ranks high because it has existed for a long time.
There is one other reason why that blog (which I no longer update) still grows in popularity - linkbacks. Any website that is linked to by other websites (particularly more prominent and popular websites) give prominence to it. Over the years my site has been linked to from thousands of blogs and websites (for various reasons).
So, there you have it!
In short, as a minister of religion, I would of course be happy to have my blog climbing in prominence and ranking. This allows me to share the message about which I am passionate (God's transforming and gracious love for the world) with many more people. It is a bit like having a 'growing congregation'.
