We’re on week three of the Weekly Blog Stats review series, and quite honestly, this week’s numbers are off the positive growth we’ve experienced over the last several months.

That’s the deal with this series; I’m laying it all out there. The good the bad and the ugly—this week it’s the ugly. Let’s jump right in and take a look.

As an introductory note, it’s interesting to notice that the trends in our metrics this week are almost exactly reversed from the week prior. All of the “Snapshot” stats on Friday reveal growth, while the weekly visitor stats across the board are down.

Blog Stats as of 07.17.09

PageRank

In last week’s review, I provided an in-depth look at PageRank and its relevance to blogging. If you want more information about PageRank, read last week’s Weekly Blog Stats Review.

The front page PageRank of Ars Grafik remains PR3. Our top PageRanked page continues to be a PR4. For more on this mystery, read the first Weekly Blog Stats Review.

Technorati Rank

As of Friday, Ars Grafik’s Technorati rank was 628,275, up from 635,062 the week prior. This is some improvement, but in realty, it shows fluctuations in the Technorati community membership more than a growth in actual authority. What do I mean by this? This week, we’ll take a look at how Technorati rank is evaluated and what its relevance is to your blog.

Technorati bills itself as a blog search engine and comprehensive source of information on the blogosphere. In essence, it functions as a blog tracking service where readers can search for content, but also where bloggers can watch the performance of their blogs against the rest of the blogosphere.

As bloggers, there are two statistics we can follow from Technorati.

Authority

Technorati Authority is based on the number of incoming links to your blog from other blogs within the last 180 days. In essence, this creates a system much like Google’s PageRank, where linking between sites is used to gauge a site’s relevance.

There is a catch within the Technorati ranking algorithm that makes it very different than PageRank. Techinorati only counts links between blogs that are are registered to its service. It may be that you have thousands of high-caliber blogs referencing your posts and linking to your blog, but if only a few of those are registered with Technorati, you will be limited to lesser Authority.

As of Friday, Ars Grafik had a Technorati Authority of five. This means that there are five blogs linking to this site who have also registered with Technorati.

Rank

The Technorati numerical rank of your blog is a number derived from your Authority. Technorati uses your Authority to rank your blog against all of the blogs registered with their service. The blog with the greatest Authority is given a rank of 1, while blogs with fewer incoming links will rank farther down the list.

In the case of Ars Grafik, this Friday we had a Technorati rank of 628,275.

I opened this section with a statement that our rise in Technorati rank had more to do with fluctuations in Technorati’s membership then with our actual Authority. I can make this statement because our Authority on Technorati has been five for the last month and a half. Since our authority hasn’t changed, it must be that the Authority of others has, and hence the improvement in our rank.

No matter what, we have lots of competition to overcome!

Alexa

Each week we have experienced a slight improvement in Alexa rank. Since Alexa generates its rank using the prior three month’s traffic stats, this is a trend we expect will continue. Friday’s Alexa rank was 133,398, up from 143,937.

Incoming Links

We’ve experienced another jump in incoming links on both Yahoo Site Explorer and on Google Webmaster Tools. On Site Explorer, Ars Grafik is registering 12,369, up from 11,866. Google Webmaster Tools shows less growth, but growth nonetheless with 13,753, up from 13,747.

While these incoming link numbers are fun, it’s important to remember that both of these services register multiple links from single domains. That’s a topic for another day.

RSS & Twitter

RSS subscribers increased by four to 34. Still plenty of growth potential here.

This week our twitter account has 368 followers, up from 329.

Weekly Stats: 07.11.2009 – 07.17.2009

Page Views

This is the first week in several months without growth in page views and related statistics. This week we logged 3,192 page views at Ars Grafik. This is a substantial drop from the week prior, when we had 3,896 page views.

Very likely there will be many ups and downs in the lifespan of this blog. It’s still difficult to see our numbers drop this precipitously after such strong growth for three months.

Last week, I addressed our low Average Time on Site as caused by unusually high StumbleUpon numbers. This serge in visits caused last week’s numbers to rise well above our typical growth trajectory. Since this week we did not see unusual StumbleUpon hits, our numbers appear off.

We will be watching over the next few weeks to see if this theory pans out.

Visits

Visits decreased also this week, bringing the total to 2,127 from 2,564 the week before.

Page Views Per Visit

Pages views per visit has been our most stable metric with almost no fluctuation over the weeks. This week we logged an average of 1.50 pages viewed per visit, just off the 1.52 from the week prior.

Average Time on Site

Last week, I discussed in detail our unusually low average time on site numbers. I pointed to an unusual strike of low quality StumbleUpon traffic. Last week, visitors averaged 59 sec. on Ars Grafik. For more on this read last week’s Weekly Blog Stats Review.

This week, things returned to normal with visitors averaging 1min. 10sec. on Ars Grafik. This nearly matched the 1 min. 8 sec. that we registered three weeks ago.

In Closing

Since Ars Grafik is such a young blog, we are still honing in on exactly what kind of service we wish to provide. Over the last three months we have produced tutorials, design inspiration, round ups, free downloads, and a variety of opinion posts. One of our goals over the next week is to decide what it is that we most enjoy producing and brand the site with this in mind. Stay tuned for these changes, and my droll commentary as they’re in the works.