The Power of the Google

Something a little odd started happening yesterday—the number of visitors to my blog more than doubled overnight. Now, when you are going from 30 visits per day to 80 visits per day, that’s not exactly earth-shattering news, but it’s always interesting to see where the new traffic is coming from.

I looked at the incoming links and found nothing, but as soon as I looked at the incoming searches, the reason for the spike was clear. People Googling “National Day of Prayer” were clicking over to my recent National Day of Prayer hijacking post. A quick visit to Google revealed that my post had somehow make it onto the first results page of the search for “national day of prayer”—the holy grail of all site owners and comment spammers everywhere.

It just shows how important Google can be in shaping web traffic. Even a two-bit no-name blog like mine can see a large swell in the incoming traffic just by being near the top of the first results page of a popular search. It will be very interesting to see what happens as the National Day of Prayer on May 6th approaches. It’s likely that an increasing number of people will search for information on the NDP, but it’s also quite likely that my blog post will slip off the first results page as more people write about it, so I doubt I will see much more traffic than I am already getting.

In the meantime, maybe I should be looking into writing a controversial blog post about Lady Gaga and Tiger Woods having a secret hook-up behind the Masters clubhouse last weekend to help keep the numbers going up…