The Power of the Google : Part Two

As I suspected would happen, my blog’s modest uptick in popularity was extremely short-lived. If you look at the chart of daily views for the current month below, you can see what happened. I posted my National Day of Prayer hijacking story on April 10th, and nothing happened until the 13th when, for some reason I have yet to fathom, the story began to appear on the first results page of the Google search “national day of prayer.”

As you can see from the chart, the page views exploded in the next three days to nearly ten times the average for the first part of the month as people clicked through from Google, but then the numbers collapsed again overnight on April 16th.

So what happened?  Well, on the evening of the April 15th, Judge Barbara B. Crabb published her opinion ruling that the National Day of Prayer was unconstitutional. Naturally that caused a whole torrent of news articles and blog posts about the issue which immediately pushed my little NDP hijacking story off the front page of the results. As of today, I eventually found my post at the very bottom of the 19th page which is why nobody is clicking through from that Google search any more.

There is still a trickle of people coming from Google looking for information about the National Day of Prayer, but they are using more specific searches like “obama abolish national day of prayer” and “christians hijacking national day of prayer” and I suspect that will continue on the run up to the day itself before petering out altogether.

There have only been two other spikes in page views for this blog. The first was when Andrew Sullivan linked to one of my two posted YouTube videos (I got nearly 2,000 page views that day) and the second was at the end of last year (when I think some other popular site did the same thing).  Of course, I wasn’t even posting anything on the blog at that time, so it was only weeks later that I discovered that my blog had been “discovered,” if only fleetingly!