Popular Posts & Weird Search Patterns

One of the features of the new template I love is the "Popular Posts" sidebar that gives the four most popular posts on this blog in the last week (you can change the timeframe on that if you want, but I like a week as a fairly large chunk of time that's not too large.

However, one thing I've noticed in checking my stats daily, and even more so now that I have a "Popular Posts" sidebar, is that people have a weird Google search pattern that is, well, kinda spooky too.

You may notice the top two posts right now are "One Hit Wonders of the 2000s (Part 31)" and "The Sphinx Mystery."

Yet I don't think those posts have been read since they were posted.

Why do I think that?

Because people are finding them on Google for their pictures, not their content.

On the one-hit wonders post, there is a picture there labelled "hunk," and I put it there as part of a joke where I provide something for my female readers to look at (since so many of the pictures in those posts are of women).

I can't count the number of Google image searches for the word "hunk" that end up on that post. I have no idea if people are downloading the picture or just clicking away from it once they see what it is, but that's the sole reason that post is the most popular of my posts.

The same is true of "The Sphinx Mystery." A lot of people are doing image searches for the Sphinx, and they land on the post.

Nobody's actually reading the content, sadly. They're either grabbing the picture or just backing out of the site. The results are a bit skewed.

But I'm not too unhappy about that.

It's nice that I apparently will always have a book review and an example of one of my great comedy series on the front page. I hope people decide to check them out when they get to my home page (or any other page, actually, since the "Popular Posts" sidebar is on all pages).

It is a bit sad that I know nobody's actually reading them at the moment, but I can get over that.

Incidentally, I'm constantly finding out cool things about this new template. I discovered the other day that it has threaded comments! So replies to comments will appear underneath the comment in question instead of at the end of the comment field. I'm very happy about that one.

And that's your blogging minutiae for the day, in case you were wondering why you're seeing the same two posts at the top of the page.