Thursday, March 13, 2008

A blogging curiosity

Like all bloggers, I imagine, I use a site to track statistics about my blog. I don't have ads, so tracking my "revenue" isn't something I need to do, but I am curious about where the people who visit my blog come from and how they got there. MapStats lists the city and country of origin, and, if the visitor uses a search engine, what phrase they searched for.

A couple of times I've thought that visitors who want to pay a return visit don't remember my address, but they remember a phrase or post title, and type that in to get back. I mean, how many times might someone type the exact phrase "Thomas Friedman is an idiot" into Google? (Well, maybe more than I think.) But that's the title of one of my posts.

Recently I've noticed a fair number of people are arriving at my blog by typing in the search phrase "No rest for the weary"-- another one of my fairly recent blog titles. Now, what would bring people from places as diverse as Jersey City, New Jersey, Rowland Heights, California, Pine Bluff Arkansas and Farnum Royal, Sough, UK to search for that phrase? Is it just a coincidence? Does anybody know?

Photo: Leo Reynolds

4 comments:

Bill Dusty said...

It is entirely possible that folks asked the same question you posed in your "No Rest for the Wicked?" post a while back. - >http://michaelannland.blogspot.com/2008/02/no-rest-for-theweary-wicked.html

If it's a biblical reference, they may be searching for where in the bible it is.

Anonymous said...

I have a similar situation.

Like you, I use a stat counter to track my readers, but don't have a need to track it for ad revenue.

Many of my readers do the same thing: they do a search for a post that they remember in particular and then link to the current page.

Considering how easy is to simply bookmark a page it seems strange.

As for the diversity of locations, I have "regular" readers from all over the globe - which is a clear indication of how immense the blogsphere is and how similar all of us human beings are, regardless of political, religious or ethnic backgrounds.

Disney is right: "It's a small world after all."

Unknown said...

Thanks, I wondered what others might say..thanks!

Sandra said...

Hi, I found your site through blog catalog and your comment on Merkal2005. I chuckled when you spoke about trying to get people to visit your site.