Sunday, May 22, 2005

A Google Hit

It seems I've scored a hit on Google. In the past, whenever I've even missed a day or two of blogging, I've noticed the number of visitors to my blog declines. In recent weeks, I've had an average of less than 10 visitors to my blog per day. So this last week, while I was gone, I figured it would drop off altogether. Wrong. It was the usual handful of stalwarts in the beginning of the week, and then on Wednesday, I had over 60 people visit, and nearly as many on Thursday and Friday. I figured somebody must have linked one of my posts. So I looked at the "referring pages" to see where these visitors were coming from. Google! Nearly every one of them. It seems that whatever "secret sauce" it takes to rise to the top of Google's results pages, I inadvertently hit it. On Wednesday, I was at the top of the list for anyone querying on "filibuster history". The Google algorithm is intentionally mysterious, but some combination of keywords, content "relevance", links, "freshness", and who knows what else. Guess I did something right.

Granted, I've been ranting about the filibuster and supermajorities long enough, so it was good of Google to send inquirers my way. Still, it's an unexpected surprise to come back from a week away and find more visitors than I've had in a long time! Now, if only some of them are from "red states" and were swayed just a bit toward the sensible conclusion. It seems that Tuesday is "nuclear day", so if the issue reaches its critical mass, I pray that there are at least 6 GOP Senators who do the right thing.

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