Unearned hits

A few weeks ago I used to consider a good blogging day to be a day on which I got 30, maybe 40 hits. Small potatoes compared to some, I know, but to me these were the most important 30 or 40 people on the internet - because, for the most part, they were looking for my site.

Something happened around the beginning of the year. Apparently a Hee Haw marathon generated a new wave of interest in Cathy Baker, the "That's All!" girl. Possibly at the same time a large number of people became infected with a bit of malware responsible for the js3250.dll crash that prevents Firefox from starting up. My site is, apparently, highly ranked for each of these searches, so I suddenly was getting a lot of hits from people looking for this information.

A lot of hits. Lately, on average, more than 100 a day. January is only a little more than half over, and already it is the fourth-highest ranked month for visitors in my blog's nearly three-year history. (Only July, August, and December of 2006 had more visitors.)

Google rank is a funny thing. One of the major factors for getting a high Google rank is the number of sites that link to yours, and how highly ranked they are. But I think another important factor is a rule that I first learned when discussing (I believe) electron sharing in covalent bonds in High School Chemistry: "Them that gots, gets." That is, the more hits you get from Google, the more hits you're likely to get from Google.

I always used to be jealous of Chloe's Watermelon Punch. She could post once a week, once a month, whatever, and her site would consistently get three times as many hits as Another Monkey, even when I was posting twice a day every day. But most of her hits were Google searches for things like "visine on nipples" and "pictures of pretty tits" (a link that pointed to a British Ornithological website). Very few people, it seemed, were coming because they were looking for her site specifically.

Chloe hasn't posted since July 23 of last year. I don't know why. I intentionally violated her "all comments must be relevant to the post on which they are made" rule a week or two ago by posting a "Where's Chloe?" comment on her top post. It stayed there for a day and then was deleted - a possible sign of life. But her "forum", where comments are allowed to flow freely, has become overrun with spam which is only occasionally deleted.

Still, given this level of inactivity her site continues to get a huge number of hits, most of them Google searches.

And now I am too. In addition to the searches noted above, I have recently gotten hits for the perennial favorite "the monkeys greatest hits" (it's Monkees, everybody!), "monkey in a dress", "monkey page", "monkey check", "sinusoidal gasoline price 2006", and "who's hotter leia or padme". I have also gotten more than a few for "colitis antibiotics", "mitral valve prolapse orthodontics", and other topics probably related to my post on Clostridium difficile. That last group I'm kinda proud of - if I've helped someone avoid a bout with c. diff, that's a good thing.

Also, I've gotten several hits from people looking for information about Tender Vittles. If the information in this post helps someone who is going through what I went through last year with Ashes, I will be glad that I was able to help a little bit.

Still, I feel guilty. There are other bloggers out here who aren't getting the hits I am, and should. Rima's Rimorama. Ashley's Ink On Paper. Even Tiffany's If I Were Queen of the World, which I only just found out about this weekend. Lots of others. Everybody linked on my sidebar is there because I read them, and I read them because they are worth reading.

Please, regardless of how you have come to this post, do me a favor and click through to some of the linked blogs. You'll be glad you did, and maybe you'll find a place you want to visit again and again. And for me, it will make all these unearned hits feel much more worthwhile.