From time to time I see people post their traffic stats and where they are getting their traffic from. Not exactly the best Idea to me, but hey, long as no one gets hurt.

I often wonder if webmasters take those stats with a gain of indifference, meaning one hit is not always equal to another. A 1000 hits from one source may not bring as many sales as 100 hits from another source. I’ve been around enough to see it happen time and time again.

When I refer to “hits” I am of course talking about a visit from a surfer, or a traffic hit.

Many also do not realize hits can vary greatly as far as how targeted they are. You could send 10,000 “fetish” hits to your adult baby site and not make squat. On the other hand 1,000 hits from a adult baby category on another site could make you some nice sales. Just because some one is surfing fetish porn doesn’t mean they are in to midgets fucking, more often not.

Just as important is future search engine traffic to your budding new fangled free site. In the above scenario, which link back do you think will give your pages more link juice?

You also have to remember, many sites, such as Links Lists have varying degree’s of traffic for each category. While Joe webmaster might not get much traffic from the Hairy page, but might get a ton from the gay twinks category.

You also don’t know Joe might have 5 sites listed with one traffic source, but only two with another. Not apples to oranges.

My point is, so many judge traffic sources from some one else’s results, often without much background as to how those results where achieved, or even more important, the quality of each traffic source.