Web traffic is down as the northern hemisphere reaches the central part of the summer, with many people on holidays and Olympic distractions coming from all directions. According to Alexa's data, many web sites and blogs directly competing in one way or another for the same audience, have seen a tangible downward traffic slope in the last two-three months due to multiple reasons.

MasterNewMedia compared head to head with some of its many competitors: Poynter.org, Scoble, Copyblogger, ProBlogger. Source data: Google Trends

In the last few months Google has been heavily adjusting and actively optimizing its search algorithms resulting in significant changes for some sites in the amount of traffic they would be getting from it. Google is now more aggressively checking for technical issues such as 404 errors, badly formatted pages with missing tags or titles, and other tech related issues.

Google has also just publicly updated its PageRank values, meaning that it is finally showing the ranking level assigned to every web page based on the number of relevant incoming links to it. As it appears the overall trend is for an overall downward adjustment of PageRank values, with many unsuspecting sites loosing a PageRank point to their previous setting. Also MasterNewMedia.org lost one PR point in this new update, either due to technical errors that my team has recently identified and is fixing now or due to structural changes that have caused our incoming total link numbers to move from over 20,000 to less than 10,000 in a the last few months.

PageRank fluctuations may be due to a site being temporarily penalized because caught breaking or being suspected to be breaking some of the official Google Guidelines. Some of the typical causes for this penalization may be due the use of paid text links, out-linking to bad sites or banned neighborhoods, duplicate content due to publication errors, malformed URLs, missing titles, pages moved around and many other possible issues.

Any web publisher who finds his site penalized by a lowering PageRank or by an apparent penalization inside Google search engine result pages (SERPs) can also fill out a re-inclusion request form which is easily accessible inside your Google Webmaster Tools account (free - registration required).

In many cases, this may help to recover your site to higher and more visible positions in the SERPs or to regain that much craved for extra PR point. The process is far from being transparent and you may have to wait a few weeks or more for anything to happen, but I must say that I have heard and read of more than one web publisher getting out of a bad traffic situation simply by submitting a reinclusion request (yes, in a good number of cases, Google may be penalizing inadvertently sites that have actually no problems, as its scanning process for guidelines breaches is fundamentally all automated).

Whatever the web traffic I get, since June of this year, every first week of each month, Master New Media, publishes all of his major web traffic, demographics and audience statistics as collected by the multiple services I use to gather accurate information about my online readers in this comprehensive monthly report.

If you would like to suggest additional stats to be included, or would like to recommend a specific analytics technology to add to this web traffic analysis toolkit, feel free to utilize the comments section at the end of this monthly web traffic report.

MasterNewMedia web traffic stats for July 2008. Here the numbers:

Master New Media Web Traffic And Audience Metrics: Jul 2008

Unique Visitors and Page Views

• Total Visits on Master New Media: 468,111


• Total Page Views on Master New Media: 689,127

MasterNewMedia International Editions - Breakdown

• MasterNewMedia International - English Version:
  • Unique visitors: 234,103
  
  
  • Page Views: 343,585





• MasterNewMedia Italian Version:
  • Unique visitors: 105,137
  
  
  • Page Views: 159,014





• MasterNewMedia Latino Version:
  • Unique visitors: 104,240
  
  
  • Page Views: 154,671





• MasterNewMedia Brazilian Version:
  • Unique visitors: 24,631
  
  
  • Page Views: 31,857

Source data: Google Analytics

Alexa measures the number of pages viewed by site visitors. Multiple page views of the same page made by the same user on the same day are counted only once. The page views per user numbers are the average numbers of unique pages viewed per user per day by the visitors to the site.

Source data: Alexa

Ad Impressions and Clicks

Source data: Google AdSense

Demographics and Technographics

Audience Age

Audience Sex

Audience Education

Audience HouseHold

Source data: Google AdPlanner

Audience Languages

Source data: Google Analytics

Traffic by Platform

Source data: Woopra - data relative to a smaller sample than total audience

Traffic by Browser

Source data: Woopra - data relative to a smaller sample than total audience

Traffic Sources

Source data: Google Analytics

Most Viewed Content

Top 10 articles MasterNewMedia.org May 2008:

1. Slow Computer? Speed Up Your PC By Disabling Unnecessary Windows Services
2. How to Send Large Files without Email: Best Services Online - Mini-Guide
3. Where to Find Free Images and Visuals for My Blog - Mini-Guide
4. Auto-Tracing: How To Convert Bitmaps To Vector Drawing - Mini-Guide
5. How To Blog: A Beginner's Blog Publishing Guide
6. How To Convert .MOD Video Files To MPEG-2 On Mac And PCs
7. How to Select Perfectly Matching Color Combinations - Mini-Guide
8. Online Picture Editing: Free Web-Based Image Editing Tools
9. PowerPoint to Flash Conversion Tools - Mini-Guide
10. Web-Based Instant Messengers: A Mini-Guide

Source data: Google Analytics

Authority

Google PageRank

Here below the Master New Media Pagerank calculated with PR Checker:

PageRank is a numeric value that represents how important a page is on the web. Google figures that when one page links to another page, it is effectively casting a vote for the other page. The more votes that are cast for a page, the more important the page must be.

If you want learn more about Pagerank here are some relevant articles:

• Guide To Understanding Google PageRank
• Google Pagerank Explained, Defined, Best Reference Resources
• Future PageRank Helps Reputation And Trustworthiness Shine Over Artificially Inflated Search Results: Google TrustRank

Alexa Rank:

The traffic rank is based on three months of aggregated historical traffic data from millions of Alexa Toolbar users and data obtained from other, diverse traffic data sources, and is a combined measure of page views and users (reach).

Source data: Alexa

Technorati Authority

Source data: Technorati

Link Popularity

Google Inbound Links

• MasterNewMedia English: 2.030


• MasterNewMedia Italian: 1.120


• MasterNewMedia Latino: 318


• MasterNewMedia Brazilian: 204

Source data: Google

Yahoo! Inbound Links

• MasterNewMedia English: 4,268


• MasterNewMedia Italian: 607


• MasterNewMedia Latino: 17

Source data: Yahoo!

Citations, Mentions and Trackbacks

Source data: Technorati

Source data: BlogPulse

Master New Media RSS Feed Stats

Source data: FeedAnalysis

Edited and prepared by Robin Good and Max Badolati for Master New Media and first published on August 5th 2008 as "Master New Media Web Traffic and Audience Metrics: Jul 2008"