I’ve been using the South African blogosphere directory, Amatomu for over a year now. The first 6 months no real problems were experienced. In the last few months I’ve had my share of problems, and their support does not seem to respond to e-mails. To have a blog listed on this directory, you are required to paste a tracking code onto your blog, for Amatomu to gather information. Amatomu then ranks one’s blog according to the amount of traffic the blog and interest the blog gets. The whole concept is actually easy to grasp and if it’s actually working it provides valuable information about ones blog, but it’s not unique. Another Blogging directory which focuses on the African blogosphere, Afrigator, also uses the same concept. The same kind of statistics can also be tracked with Google Analytics. If any of you were wondering, the picture below is not of me or my cat, it’s just to carry across my mood today.
The first problem I have with Amatomu is that my posts on this blog, Running Wolf’s Rant, are not being updated in the blog statistics, even if I have pinged my blog on the service Amatomu provides. The statistics don’t indicate the amount of hits on new posts, even though some posts have had hundreds of views in some cases. I’ve re-submitted the blog to the directory from scratch in an attempt to try and fix this, but the problem still persists. I have e-mailed them about this problem a few times, but have not received a reply about this yet.
Since the time I’ve re-submitted the blog I’ve managed to get up to a rank of 142 on Amatomu. For the last 2 days I’ve experienced a second problem which drove me to write this post. For the last 2 days, all my blogs have not been tracked by Amatomu, even though all of them either have the WordPress plugin or tracking code added to them. Because of this, this blog, Running Wolf’s Rant has fallen down to a rank of 205 in 2 days. This is frustrating, since I’m working on getting into the top 100 blogs on Amatomu. I’m going to e-mail Amatomu about this today and hoping to get a response.
Seems that I’m not the only one dissatisfied with their service. Chris M has also written about his blog. It’s one thing to offer a service that gives your blog(s) exposure on the net, but if one does then it should actually work. They should add proper contact details or maybe just attempt to actually help their users or they should stop the service altogether and call it a day. I’m really tired of bad service in South Africa.
I had the same experience with this rubbish.
I tried to register and it wouldn’t let me.
I then tried to get some supportt on the matter and guess what, no response! Im much happier using Afrigator and Muti.co.za
Joe Social: Thank you for your comment. I’m hoping to get a proper response from them or maybe they’ll wake up!
I agree with you 110%. My blog was ranked 31 on Amatomu and has been constantly there for a while and over night it has dropped to 65. There is something seriously wrong there.
Thabo & Joe Social: I’ve heard a rumour about them upgrading their servers, so lets be patient
Time will tell, sooner or later, time will tell.
Amatomu has been annoying me beyond comprehension as of late. I have never really worried about the ranking of my site on amatomu because no matter what I try it never seems to work properly.
The most reads some of my posts have received according to amatomu is seven. My least viewed posts are around about 60 views. In addition, apparently I get maybe ten page views a day according to amatomu, when my site stats are way, way above that.
I give up.
Nice one! Great to see other bloggers picking up on this.
Random fix – Your link to Amatomu is broken
I did a check on my stats for Amatomu today and they seem to have corrected it. Hope something like that doesnt happen again soon.
Philip Straton: Thank you for your feedback, sometimes I feel that way too. But sometimes I tend to rant about Google Analytics as well. In most cases, both are quite accurate.
Chris M: Random fix where? Thanks for the comment though
Ok, weird thing… My stats on amatomu are working now :/ Properly for the first time ever… Guess that rant worked somehow
Philip Straton: Good to hear. Let’s hope it stays that way
I totally agree! The entire algorithm of Amatomu is screwed!
I was ranked in the Top 50 and now it say’s “there’s a problem with your Amatomu tracking code!” which I haven’t changed at all.
Best of all is the message which shows up when you try update the feed:
“Oops, you hit a database error. It’s either something we did, or something you did. Yeah, it’s probably your fault.”
Also – when I could see my ranking, it would rank me as 46 on the front page and when you click the list to view more – the ranking changes. WTF????
What was once a good ranking system is busy going down the tubes. Off to Afrigator for me
Rudi: I removed all my blogs from Amatomu until they fix the damn site, was ranked under the top 200 and had the same problem and I got fed up, to be honest. They should rather take the site offline and fix things their end.
Its not the only thing in South Africa that sucks. So does SOUTH AFRICAN AIRWAYS.
Danie Strydom´s last blog ..Comment on Why do I bother? by admin
Amatomu lost my blog completely. At first they replied a couple times saying hang in there, we’re trying to get your copy back to you. Then they said “due to poor decisions at start up” it was hard. Then they just went quiet. So a year or two’s stories were lost. Jason someone at M&G was the promiser.
bewilderbeast: Thank you for reporting this to us