stats 101

Sun2.3.19

      I have found the reasons why my stats are so low on the Squarespace site.  Squarespace have what they call blog pages with a section for comments where one can keep adding entries as I do every week.  The page does not reflect the essay but a snippet of it with the title and an image, underneath which is an arrow that states, Read More and gets one to the complete essay.  I have twenty per page, https://www.luhrenloup.com/journal-archives.  One can choose to have more or less.

      Now I ask you, do you want your week’s bon mots presented in such a fashion?  I had problems with this set up from the start.  Although I wanted a blog where folks could leave a comment if they cared to, this business of presenting them with a page full of past journal snippets along with the current posting wasn’t very appealing.  I wanted the journal page to open that week’s full essay, not a snippet, and I did just that; the journal has its own separate page with a button that leads to blog page with my past entries.  These blog pages don’t make a lot of sense.  Why would a person care to comment on past entries?  What’s more, I would have no way of knowing if someone did leave a comment unless I looked up each entry individually on a regular basis.  I solved the comment problem by bringing the Disqus setup to my site.

So what’s the problem with the stats?  Google has two great sites, Google analytics, and the Google Search Console.  The analytics lets you know how many visitors, their gender, how they reached you, what they’re looking at, how much time spent, etc.  Also some analysis on whether you’re gaining or losing hits in the long run.

The console does more, it takes you behind the curtain and shows you how it operates, what it chooses to index, i.e. to scroll through, catalogue and list in their search engine.  It can even point out why such and such a page hasn’t been indexed and tell you how to correct the situation.  Through the console I found that none of my past journal pages are indexed.  The way Squarespace blog pages are set up only the blog page itself is indexed, not the multitude of entries.  Oh, maybe if you add a tag that catches Google’s eye there’s a small chance that they’ll pick up the entry.

I have two blog pages on my site, one for the journal archives and the other for podcasts.  How to resolve this problem?  I have an onerous task awaiting.  I’ve started creating a page to hold snippets of past entries like the blog page, but it stands alone and is not a blog page.  I have to create a separate page for all my past entries, 65 of them and in this fashion, they will be indexed by search engines. 

There is nothing to be done for the podcast blog page because it is set up in such a way to accommodate Apple, which is the big cheese in the podcast world.  Podcasting sites all go to Apple and download what Apple has picked up from subcribers like myself.  Although I am hurt by not having my individual podcasts indexed in the search engines, they do pick up what the podcasting sites are listing as the hits my individual podcasts are generating.  So, nothing to be done there.