Thursday, March 24, 2005

Fun with traffic monitoring and search engines

For some time I've been curious how many visitors this blog gets, but until yesterday I had never done anything about it. Now I've added a StatCounter to the blog's template, which allows me to see how many visitors I get on a daily basis and how they arrived here.

The results have surprised me. In other words, I'm getting more hits, not to mention bringing in more international visitors, than I expected.

Since a lot of blogspot.com sites have been the referring links, my suspicion is that several visitors arrived here via the Next Blog button in the banner across the top of sites using Blogger. Of greater interest to me are those visitors finding this blog by search engine. Google searches for "hush paltrow spoiler" (third search result) and "memorable quotes from load of the rings-return of the king" (sixth result) and a Yahoo search for "howard hughes hell's angel" (fifth result) have led people here. Typos apparently helped me a lot because correcting "load" with "lord" in that search doesn't put me in the top 100 results. The same is true when searching in Yahoo for the correct title of Hughes' film. Search engines are quirky things.

Of these three searches, only one--my review of HELL'S ANGELS--delivered what the person was probably looking for in the first place. The visitor wanting spoilers for HUSH instead was led to my entry "In Defense of Gwyneth". The LORD OF THE RINGS quote seeker found my 2004 Oscar winner predictions.

I won't bore you all, however many that is, with site data like this on a regular basis, but I thought it was interesting stuff. I suppose this also should add further motivation to update regularly. (I've been lax in posting last week's NOW PLAYING reviews, for instance.)

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