(This post was taken down in a naive thought that things would be worked out. Things didn’t.)
Another view/hit/click generator site has picked me up. Oh joy. As if Alphainventions wasn’t bad enough. Time to add blogsurfer.us to the list of rejected referrers. Talk about pissing in the pool. The forums attached to blogsurfer.us have the same rose-colored filters as AI. Lots of “wow, I got thousands of views, what a great service”, and not a single “how to remove my blog from your rotation”.
I am not a fan of “services” like these as my blogs are not money makers. Not a single ad of mine anywhere, and if I move the blogs to private hosting, still no ads. The topics I tend to write about are a narrow focus. Either you’re looking for stuff like this, or you’re not. Those viewers shotgunning sites are not highly likely to stick around with mine. If I were desperate for eyeballs, I would post cleavage shots with the bindrunes drawn on my chest.
My informal survey of my readers tell me you guys either know me personally, came here following links from other (somewhat) related sites, or really got caught up in the NaNoWriMo story. I would rather have my daily view statistics in the single digits, and have readers that are engaged (even if no comments are left… not whining much), than be “featured” for five (yes, only five!) seconds before being switched out for $NextRandomBlog.
I do have some means in place to reject the “blog promotional” sites from loading mine, but it is not a complete solution, and I still have them muddying up my logs. The only way to truly deal with these parasites is through a .htaccess file. Which I don’t have access to because I’m using Blogger as my platform.
Now that I’m committed to the blog(s), if this keeps up after the winter holidays, I’ll be getting a domain name, some good hosting, and moving the blogs off Blogger.