I bounced back in a big way in January with a smidgeon over 55,000 hits, thanks in large part to a gazillion search engine referrals for Ashley McElhiney. At a guess, I’d say I’d have had a more modest 45,000 hits or so without that. Why she was such a popular search engine request I can’t say, but it drove me some traffic, that’s for sure.
Unfortunately, a lot of my top referrers for the month were spam sites, something which is continuing in February and which is crowding out some real referrers. I have no idea why any spammer would think this is a good thing for them to do, since the only place these URLs show up is on pages that require a login, but they’re there and they’re really annoying. I even got a bunch of spam referrals that appear to be spoofing a legitimate blog. Go figure on that one. At some point, I may try to implement this solution for referral spam, but it’s low on my to-do list right now.
Be that as it may, I am as always glad you, the actual readers, stopped by. That’s what matters, and it’s why I do these posts every month. Thank you all very much. Top (real) referrers and search terms are beneath the More link.
Aggregators, collections, indices, etc ====================================== 296: http://blo.gs/ 242: http://www.bloglines.com Weblog referrers ================ 1938: Daily Kos
1696: Political Animal
723: Atrios
567: TAPPED
320: The Burnt Orange Report
141: The Sideshow
128: Pandagon
Top search terms ================ #reqs: search term -----: ----------- 7044: ashley mcelhiney 497: ryan pitylak 468: extreme home makeovers 364: diane zamora 332: park dietz 327: schlitterbahn galveston 317: real men of genius 293: whfs 276: naugas 276: buy girl scout cookies 221: american idol tryouts 218: ryan samuel pitylak 153: klol 141: bill burkett 129: dr park dietz 129: rusty yates 124: trans texas corridor 120: ugly people 109: off the kuff
Congratulations, and keep up the good work! As ever, I can merely hope to ride your coattails and bask in your reflected glory!! Cheers….