A quick look at the so-called “most popular weblogs” on the front page of jroller shows some unfamiliar names. Surprised at seeing some of the new names, I clicked through, wanting to see if they had something incredibly interesting to say today. Nope. One of them has only one new entry this year. Easily a third of these weblogs have a referrer list on the front page, with less than 10% of their hits coming in direct, and a long list of obvious referrer-spam.

Turn off the referrer list on your blog’s main page. If YOU want to know how people have been arriving at your site, it’s available in the configuration pages. Nobody else cares. Sure, seeing your name on the jroller front page might be a nice ego stroke, but it doesn’t mean squat. You’re just increasing adding more noise to the internet, twice over. First because your blog gets top billing, even if you have nothing interesting to say that day. Second because even when you DO have something interesting to say, there’s a crappy list of useless referrers like cowsearch.com, seekmoose.com, and dontyouwanttofindsomeporn.net scrolling down the screen, polluting your blog. Turn it off.