The Real Hidden Value of Old Post Traffic

Since creating my Weekly Digest, I’m forced to look through my blog stats on a regular basis, something I’ve been loath to do for many years. Most of it doesn’t interest me as I’ve been doing this too long to worry over the micro-statistics, but I’ve been watching an interesting trend that has now turned into a habit. The kind of habit that means the most to me.

Old blog posts you’ve published with links to my blog content continue to bring me traffic, sometimes even a year or more after publishing.

Here’s some examples.

In January 2007, Smashing Magazine wrote a best of January 2007 list featuring my article Designing a WordPress Theme From Scratch, the 67th post published on this blog. What a fantastic way to start off my new year with a gift that continues to give. This was followed up in February 2007 with Smashing Magazine released “83 Beautiful WordPress Themes You Probably Haven’t Seen Yet” with a link to the same article. The oldest referral was in September 2006 for their The List of Lists for More Must-Have Bookmarklets published October 2005.

Why should I care about old blog posts linking to my old posts? All these continue to bring in traffic consistently. Today, each of these three incoming referral links brought in a combination of 67 people.

I’ve been a huge fan of Darren Rowse of Probloger and have been honored to guest blog for him on several ocassions. Yet, it isn’t my guest blog posts that bring in the most traffic from his site but his two blog posts featuring highlights from my month long series on WordPress Plugins in February 2007, one on monetizing Plugins links to Monetizing WordPress Plugins and the other a recommendation to check out Lists of Your Favorite WordPress Plugins. These two incoming links consistently bring in traffic every day, even after over a year.

I write full time for the Blog Herald and you would think that a lot of my posts there bring in a ton of traffic to Lorelle on WordPress. Yet, only one ever shows up on the chart on a regular basis. Writing and Publishing Code in Your WordPress Blog Posts written in July 2007 is the winner for referrals from the Blog Herald by a wide margin.

My work on this blog has brought a ton of awards, honors, and being on lists, but no list continues to drive in traffic more than the Top 25 Blogs About Blogging by Daily Blog Tips published in May 2007. I’m often embarrassed by these but a part of me would think that being nominated and winning some of the blogosphere’s top awards would bring in more traffic than a list of the top blogs about blogging from Technorati. I guess you are only as good as your last blog post, not award. 😉

As I dug through the new WordPress.com stats feature for historical summaries of my blog’s incoming referrals, I noticed that Lifehacker did an article on content theft in March 2007 featuring What Do You Do When Someone Steals Your Content, which continues to point new traffic my direction. While I have other articles that attract a lot of consistent traffic, this one article has incoming links from an amazingly diverse collection of websites, blogs, forums, bookmarking sites, and social site submission services from around the world, including Digg. Two years after it was published, there is rarely a day that goes by that someone doesn’t link to and recommend that article as a resource for tips on how to respond to a copyright violation. As of today, there are 206 trackback links published on the post from blogs with trackback capability. The article gets more traffic and attention now than when it was originally published as more and more people are getting their blog content scraped. Makes it worth the four months I spent fussing and verifying everything in that article, and my anxiety that the only comments would come from the “Internet is free” crowd. I’m still so proud of how much that article has helped so many.

I also found out that I was FAMOUS. I was listed in Wikipedia in an article on bookmarklets, which directed visitors to More Must-Have Bookmarklets published in October 2005, though it is no longer listed. I wonder why? Still, it brought in a lot of traffic for a very long time – enough to push it high into the all-time incoming stats list.

In an amusing twist of creative backlinking and cross blog communication, Staska.net resorted my list of the favorite WordPress Plugins as defined by users into a statistical chart that highlighted the top 30 WordPress Plugins in the Blogosphere in March 2007 and that list continues to drive traffic my way. What a gift and contribution to my month long series on Plugins.

There are so many bloggers I’m grateful to for their continued, and unwitting, support of my blog like WPBits, Christine Davis, Jan of Circular Communication, Best Blogs on WordPress blog, kl3tt.de, and…oh, the list is very long. Thank you all, no matter if you send me one or one thousand links to any of my posts, no matter how old they are. Each link is appreciated.

In true WordPress-love-in style, the oldest, consistent traffic link referral comes from someone I hold close to my WordPress heart: Kaf of Guff.Szub.net. He didn’t write about me or my blog in his article on his popular Post Templates by Category WordPress Plugin, as Lorelle on WordPress debuted a month later. However, in December 2006, someone in the comments recommended my article, Creating Multiple Single Posts for Different Categories, which, if memory serves, was a team effort in which he helped along with other fine WordPress fellows. A lot of people head to that article about his Plugin and track their way to my blog from the recommendation from the comments. Proof that a link from almost anywhere can be a good link.

What a world we weave when first we conceive to link.

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Copyright Lorelle VanFossen, the author of Blogging Tips, What Bloggers Won't Tell You About Blogging.