I forgot webrings exist

I don’t usually check analytics on my website, but the hosting I use on Vercel does provide the ability to check referrals, and I have to admit, every once in a while I enjoy to see those!

It’s not because I am obsessed with people who visit my website (although I kind of am), or because I want to write according to what my readers view the most (although I sometimes do that too). I simply love to see when someone links to a post of mine for the first time, and I see their website on my referrals showing up. A lot of the time it’s only four or five clicks from X or Y small website.

Since I only get the referral, an investigation is sure to follow! I love to explore blogs, digital gardens, and personal websites in any form. Checking their blogrolls, reading through their guestbooks, skimming through posts to see where we may share interests or hobbies.

However, every once in a while I’d find a website that would have no mention of me whatsoever anywhere in the page, and I wasn’t sure how they ended up linking back to me, you know? I had to go even deeper. Maybe using things like FreshRSS’s user queries, websites like Backlink Watch or cool search engines like Marginalia, which has lots of neat information about sites on its index.

But no, even then I couldn’t see where some of those clicks were coming from, and I kind of left it there, it doesn’t matter that much after all. You see where this is going right?

Last year I wrote a pretty extensive list of every blogroll, webring and site that links to me, but well, I always enjoy belonging to more of them, I guess.

Today I wanted to get setup on The Worst Webring, and I edited my footer to add the corresponding URLs for Next, Previous and Random. Typical webring stuff.

I decided I would check if all the other webrings were still working (one of them, the previous link on Geekring, currently does not, by the way), so I clicked on all of the previous and next links, and that’s where it finally hit me.

The reason I was getting referrals from websites that didn’t have any links to me, was because those websites were my neighbours in the webrings I’m on!

So any people clicking around the webrings and ending up visiting my website, come from my neighbors, who don’t really link to my site, but I happen to be the next/previous site on the ring for them!

I didn’t forget webrings exist, I simply forgot how they work, by helping people build connections!

So, that kind of puts me in an awkward position, how come I have never checked up on my neighbors before?

Umm, hi :3

This is day 40 of #100DaysToOffload