Something really weird happened today at noon. What, you wonder? Well, my photo blog does not attract many daily visitors. I don’t really try to promote it, though perhaps I should. All of a sudden, in just four and a half minutes, I had many more hits than what I usually get, like several weeks’-worth of visitors in one go! Before I checked the details in my Site Meter I thought it had to do with the fact that I had already had a mysterious comment, which I quickly deleted. That visitor’s comment seemed to be from an automated source, reacting to a key search word, namely “Sunbathing”, which on my blog was something completely innocent. The comment, from some playboy website, used a revealing vocabulary, offering an exchange of files. As if! Suffice it to say, I did not click on the link. Aaaam not stooopid!
On closer inspection of my stats, using the “Visitors By Referral” feature, I discovered this had happened before. I had not noticed this avalanche phenomenon previously, since I don’t check the photo blog stats very often. What I found was that these visits were all referred by the Blogger Navbar, and it all dawned on me. Of course! I do it myself; sometimes I just click on the “Next Blog” button, which takes you to a completely random blog. Somehow Blogger must put your blog in some sort of loop of available blogs for a few minutes. In my experience it is possibly a rather small number of blogs at a time, due to the fact that I have more than once been served the same blog within a couple of minutes. How do they choose what blogs to enter in the loop? Not a clue. All I know is that clicking that button and hoping to find anything you find remotely interesting, is like panning for gold in the Yukon. However I have to admit, I have actually found some nuggets in the last year. And of course it is always satisfying to boost a fellow blogger’s statistics; we all want the traffic, don’t we?
Posts
7 comments:
Whew! At least it was a harmless source. A few years back, I shaved my head to raise money for cancer and posted a photo on my blog. Then it got lifted by a fetish website for people who dig shaved heads on women. Suddenly my site stats went through the roof. I shudder to think where that photo ended up.
I've had people who have clearly either arrived by the "next blog" button or by the list of "recently published" blogs they have on the blogger main page. I haven't looked at it in a while but I think there's a kind of rolling list of people who have just posted and a lot of curious people just click to take a look.
Funny you should mention this Swen, last Thursday I had the same reaction a minute after I posted my blog post, I recieved 49 hits in seconds, imagine my surprise.
Like Christina said though.... I knew none of the 'Hitters' :)
Diane - you cannot be careful enough, but on the other hand, you cannot predict people's actions. Keep your hair, stuff the stats! ;-)
Christina - I think you are absolutely right, it could also be the recently updated blogs. I didn't think of that myself since I sign in automatically and don't see that page myself normally. And a blog with the word Camera in it obviously attract more accidental visitors.
Eric - Boost those stats; keep posting Eric!
I'm sure you'll have a lot of traffic on your post below, too. You have the word "tits" very often in there. google.
But don't worry... LOL! They'll leave pretty quickly once they find out it's all about birds ;)
Good that you passed that info on - sometimes I can be quite naive. I stopped hitting 'next blog' because more often than not it is some kind of p**n or some blog that just wants to make money. I must go and check out my states - I forget to look.
CS - Actually not; I think they will be looking for pictures and stop when they see the bird in Google.
Lynda - Yes, hitting that "Next Blog" button becomes a bit tedious after a while.
Post a Comment