Check That Blog’s Traffic

Tech blog Valleywag calls out high traffic site the Drudge Report by saying that it overly auto-refreshes their web-pages in people’s browsers to hype their traffic. VW says:

A site’s ‘meta refresh’ setting is a web page’s meta tag used to specify a time-interval after which a web browser will automatically refresh the page. Most sites leave it to readers to call for the latest version of a page; but popular news sites often assume that visitors will leave their pages open, and ensure the page is reloaded so that the latest headlines show.

Nothing wrong with that — except that the Drudge Report is automatically refreshed way more often than the frequency of new stories would justify. At 20 times an hour, Drudge is twice as aggressive in his use of this tactic as the next news site we checked.

What’s the effect on the site’s traffic? Each refresh counts as a new pageview, whether or not the user is watching, or the window remains visible.

If you’re conducting a blog advertising campaign – it may be worth checking the refresh rates in the blogs you’ve added to your plan.

Read more: TRAFFIC TRICKS: Matt Drudge’s spin – Valleywag