Tuesday, September 17, 2013

Perplexingly Popular Post

My "every blogger has a story, here's mine" post from less than two weeks ago has well over 1700 views now.. Far and away my most popular post. That's a crazy number. (For comparison, my "who the hell is Cesar Geronimo" post from two weeks prior has just 19 hits as I write this.) And even though it's been up for a while, it's still getting lots of hits everyday.. like nearly 200 views a day.

Here's an "outtake" photo that I didn't end up using in the "my story" post: our 3rd Grade class picture. Now I kinda feel bad that I've been badmouthing Dustin to several hundred readers! He's really not a bad guy.
I spent a lot of time writing the thing, so I'm glad people are reading it, but still a little confusing how it's such a popular post. It only has 5 comments, which is also weird. And in all those hundreds of new readers, I've only picked up 1 or 2 new followers.. Should I be hurt by that paltry ratio? And the increased traffic hasn't continued with subsequent posts, unfortunately (My new Refractin' Action series hasn't gone over much at all; Screw it, I like it and I'm gonna keep on doing them anyways!) I try not to get too hung up on things like views and followers, but still, it's hard to ignore such a big variance in traffic.

Do any of you bloggers out there have similar stories of a certain post of yours that inexplicably gets waaaayy more traffic than the rest of your blog?

I'm not sure where all these hits are coming from, and the "traffic sources" info from Blogger doesn't reveal much. Hmm. It's probably a weird internet quirk, like bots or something, or maybe a hot keyword/term in there somewhere.. not really a bunch of people super interested in learning how a random guy got into collecting baseball cards, right? I mean, I also talked about my youth a bit in the post where I bragged about going to high school with NASCAR legend Jimmie Johnson, and that post is my least-popular, with only 14 views as of this moment, despite being up for months. So yeah, it's weird trying to figure out the internet sometimes.
But anyways, thanks for reading!

7 comments:

  1. There are some words in post titles that automatically attract web bots and artificially inflate your "hit count." Don't ask me why or how. I've stopped using the word "post" in titles. I've also tried to stop using the word "cardboard" because it does the same thing (weird I know).

    It's made me stop looking at my web traffic in any meaningful way.

    Just the wacky internet at work in it's usual bizarre way.

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    1. Bummer, that's what I figured. Still, though, I'll try to delusionally pretend that the post is hugely popular and I'm an internet celebrity.

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  2. I admit it. I read your post 1650 times. I just can't stop myself.

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  3. One of my posts has a photo of Mount Rushmore which causes it to get a ton of hits. But don't think it's led to me having any new followers.

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  4. Now THIS post is getting a bunch of hits (100 in the first day.. that's a lot for me!) I wonder if this is another probable bot bait? Oh well. Like Night Owl says, I should probably stop trying to make sense of the web traffic stats.

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  5. Anytime I put the words Kraken, Epoxy Card Table, or Flamin' Hot Cheetos in a post title my hit count spikes BIG time. I'm toying with the idea of using all three in a post title. But, I don't want to break the interwebs.

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