People are pretty darned excited that one of our faltering city dailies has started including links to other sites in its homepage news coverage. But what I've found about having one of those links point to my site will probably disappoint you.

Surely it is an exciting time to be a neighborhood blogger in Seattle. The swiftly tilting media landscape in the city means many neighborhood blogs are playing larger roles than ever. Some of the businesses being built are getting International attention. Then there is this: The Seattle PI, as it struggles toward the end of its life as a newspaper and the possible birth of its life as an online news site, has started including coverage from other sites in its Web site's 'top story' headline mix.

To many, it feels like a monumental shift -- a major metropolitan daily putting aside its authority to make space for coverage from other journalistic entities. That neighborhood blogs be counted among these journalistic entities makes the situation seemingly all the more extraordinary. It feels like a major plank has been put in place to build a neighborhood news business from. Imagine! The opportunity to build your own neighborhood news and information site bolstered by bursts of readers from the city's major news players. We'll all be rich!

So I was extraordinarily excited on Tuesday when the powers that be at PI.com deemed my neighborhood blog's coverage of a recent city council vote homepage-worthy. Here's a screengrab:

It was an exciting moment for me. For one, while it was far from the best piece I've ever writing, it validated my site as a contributor to the city's news scene. But it also had practical implications. My site was flooded with a steady flow of visitors from Seattle PI's site. The analytics kept counting. The ad impressions kept rolling in.

But as I checked my site analytics, I noticed something wasn't quite right. Two quality measures that I keep track of were really negative. The longer the PI link was up, the more the measures sank. I dug into a spreadsheet or two of data from the day to see what was happening. Here is what I found.

The PI link did, indeed, send a flood of visitors to my site -- but they didn't engage with my site's content like my other visitors to the article did that day. The PI crowd were 30% less active on my site than other visitors and they were way more likely to simply look at one page and leave. Worse, they engaged with my advertising at an even worse rate.

But maybe those comparisons aren't fair. Included in the 'All other' numbers are visitors who went directly to my site or found it via search -- those experiences are quite a bit different than clicking on a random headline link.

To balance the field, I compared the PI visitors to only those other CHS visitors who came from another referring site (excluding RSS readers which presumably would send along a more engaged visitor and likely make the PI numbers look even worse). While the comparison improves the PI traffic's relative standing, the audience the link created was still of much lower quality. Unfortunately, I am unable to break out advertising numbers at this level but I presume they were of equally low engagement.

So, my point in all of this isn't to tell the PI to stop linking to my site or to criticize the audience they have built -- I'm sure it is a very nice audience for a newspaper Web site. Their site is at such a different scale than mine that it should have been obvious that I'd get a different kind of visitor out of the 'transaction.'

Instead, the takeaway is this: Independent news and information site owners should temper their expectation about how much big media can contribute to the success of their businesses. I already knew that but now I've got the numbers to prove it. In the end, the only Web analytic that truly matters for your burgeoning neighborhood news site is the measure of human beings that come directly to your site. That's the number that is in your hands. That's the most valuable audience. Everything else is a distraction.