Hi, all. My name is John. I’ve shown up around these parts in the past to stir up some shit. BP was dumb enough to give me access to his site so that I can write here from time to time. A few days ago, BP sent out a tweet that made me raise an eyebrow. This tweet:
Over 50K hits on LobShots today. A big ole xoxo to you that come to play every day. Love you guys. Well, most of you.
— Brady Phelps (@LobShots) July 9, 2013
What? I call BS. Over 50K hits in a day? Well, then I realized that Sports Illustrated and a bunch of other sites linked up a certain LobShots story… well, 50k makes a lot more sense now. BS call retracted. Well, that very same day I saw something else that raised an eyebrow….
I have a question about a certain tweet. This tweet, actually:
Looks like we will break 2,000,000 page views for the year later this month. Thanks for all the support. #congregation #FHM
— Friarhood (@friarhood) July 9, 2013
Did he say 2 MILLION page views for the year? That can’t be right, can it? It’s time for some….
Now, some of you may not know this about me, my day job lends itself well to this type of investigation. I work for a web development company, and my specialty is SEO and traffic analysis.
I have a pretty good idea of what everyone’s traffic is, or I at least have the tools to get a pretty good idea of what everyone’s traffic is. This is why I found it odd that Friarhood has 2 million page views in the first half of 2013. That number seemed staggeringly high, actually. So, join me while we journey down this rabbit hole towards the truth…..together.
Let’s start with Bolts from the Blue. I’m proud of my little San Diego Chargers blog, and (with the backing of a wonderful blogging network and writing staff) the traffic has grown to a point that actually blows my mind sometimes.
With 2013 including the firing of the Head Coach and General Manager, and a search for their replacements, you would think BFTB’s 2013 traffic would be pretty great, right?
Hmmmm. Only 2.5 million pageviews so far this year. That’s barely more than Friarhood is claiming to have.
I wonder what Gaslamp Ball, BFTB’s sister site for all things Padres related, has done in 2013?
No worries, I’ll do that math for you. Gaslamp Ball has had 783,623 pageviews in 2013 so far….and they’re not exactly slouches over there.
My buddies over at Padres Public let me know that they’ve gotten roughly 150,000 pageviews on their site since launching in February. (updated with screengrab)
If you don’t know their story, they took 12 (yes, twelve) different Padres blogs and combined them into one superblog.
While here at LobShots, the fearless BP has single-handedly (with apologies to Showman and a few of his buddies that write from time to time) driven enough people crazy to get about 615,000 pageviews this year. Let’s review:
2013 Pageviews to-date:
friarhood: 2 million?
boltsfromtheblue.com: 2.5 million
gaslampball.com: 783,000
padrespublic.com: ~150,000
lobshots.com: ~615,000
Is it possible that Friarhood gets three times as much traffic LobShots, more than twice as Gaslamp Ball, and almost as much as Bolts from the Blue? That’s the real question.
I’ve heard, while asking around and writing this post, from a few different people that a link from Gaslamp Ball gets noticeable traffic to their page while a link from Friarhood barely registers. How could that be? Perhaps we need another way to look at this.
Domain Authority/Page Authority of Home Page (high numbers are better):
friarhood.com: 39/46
boltsfromtheblue.com: 50/58
gaslampball.com: 51/59
padrespublic.com: 31/39
lobshots.com: 40/48
Leaving out the 5-month-old Padres Public (which, my goodness, has made some incredible progress in that short time span), FH has the lowest DA and PA of any of the sites being compared here.
Maybe they just have a ton of pages for people to find through search engines?
Number of indexed pages on Google:
FH: 8,070
BFTB: 8,590
GLB: 16,100
PP: 1,710
LS: 14,800
Well, it’s not that.
Something is fishy here. I know FH has a pretty big social media presence. Perhaps that’s where the difference lies?
Facebook Likes/Twitter follows:
FH: 4,485/9,716 (although they also follow over 8,000 twitter accounts)
BFTB: 1,705/5,762
GLB: 629/4,036
PP: 233/1,115
LS: 357/3,923
That’s a pretty sizeable lead in social media for Friarhood (although I won’t discuss here how they’ve gotten those Likes and Follows). Is it enough to triple the traffic of GLB and LobShots? I’m not sure. Possibly.
You know what? This is dumb. I’m done trying to figure this out. If Friarhood wants to tweet their traffic out, it shouldn’t be that out of line for me to ask for some proof, right? So, this is me doing that.
I’ve shown you mine, now you show me yours.
**editor’s note: Friarhood has responded**
-John