Blaugust 2025 numbers

I had few serious goals for my sophomore Blaugust participation in 2025. Essentially I just wanted to feel like I was involved despite having a low ‘blogging’ drive. And I achieved that limited goal: mostly by reading the work of other, more energetic participants.

Once again I’ve gathered some ‘end of August’ numbers illustrating the nuts and bolts of my blogging experience. I’ve definitely proven the adage that you get out of life what you put into it: my low-energy involvement with Blaugust 2025 is reflected in my rather weak statistics for the month. But I still feel I got more than I deserved in terms of ideas, support, and inspiration.

Please refer to my related post from last year, Blaugust 2024 numbers, for comparison and additional explanations

A few more posts

I wrote a total of nine (9) posts in August including this one, and all of them were here on Kelly’s World. I had plans to post on both of my other blogs (Geek on a Harley and Words of the AgingGamer) but didn’t follow through in time.

Nine posts isn’t a lot, but it is more than the zero posts I managed in Jun and July, or the five I completed in May. In that sense my Blaugust post ‘output’ was quite successful. The only thing I regret is that I didn’t manage to post to my other two blogs. I’m going to have to work on that!

Some comments and likes

Blaugust encourages participants to visit and interact with each other’s blogs, and I was a grateful recipient of that kind of attention. My posts received ten times the number of likes and infinitely more comments than July, an increase which clearly shows that Blaugustinians share the love.

WordPress stats

The statistics that WordPress’ Jetpack plugin provides are not particularly detailed. However, they give me a fairly clear sense that Blaugust was effective at increasing the attention my site gets.

What they don’t explain is what the heck was going on in July of this year. On a single day (Thursday, July 10), my site received nearly 2,000 views from almost 1,200 visitors. That’s several times what my site receives in a month, and the vast majority of those views came from a single country- Germany. This aberrant day renders comparison between August and July of this year more than a little suspect.

August

July

Full year

Google search stats

My Google numbers continue to be abysmal, which seems to be a fact of life for this blogger at least. The total number of times my site showed up in searches barely tops 1,500 for the month. On average Ubergeek Kelly’s World doesn’t appear until several pages down the results list, somewhere past position 40.

There is barely any difference between the Google stats for Kelly’s World between July and August. Google has decided to ignore me, and that’s just the reality of their search algorithms.

Google keywords

One good piece of news about my Google status: the keywords linked to my site are no longer completely dominated by references to Slashdot. The changes I made last year to apply the ‘rel=nofollow’ property to Slashdot RSS feed links seems to have worked.

Wrap up

Blaugust has once again had a positive effect on my blog’s visibility. More importantly, it has been enjoyable to read what other bloggers are writing, and to be inspired by their efforts. I have a bit more incentive and energy to keep on writing, which is a net good in my opinion.

I continue to see my site disappear from Google search without any clear path towards reversing this trend. I’m not interested in SEO or commercialization, but I am saddened by the way the world’s most popular search engine seems to be intent on silencing smaller voices on the web. Maybe I can turn this into a positive: since my blog is barely findable using Google that is sort of like being on the Dark Web, right?

Barring the unforeseen, I expect I will be participating in next year’s Blaugust when it comes.