Interesting stats and search engine rankings
As any good webmaster does, I’ve been pouring over my stats and logs as of late in an order to try and weed out any 404 hits for my wiki. Since I reorganized my site a few months ago to move the wiki into a subdirectory and have the blog be the main attraction, I’ve had a ton of 404s in relation to searches on Outlook error messages and Exim errors. Thankfully, Google has been quick to dump these old links in favor of the new ones.
However, I’m noticing a sharp trend in my stats for this month in particular. My posts about the upcoming ABC debate between two Christians and two Atheists and the PBS documentary about the history of non-theist thought have generated enormous amounts of traffic. In almost any permutation of PBS atheism documentary and ABC atheist debate, I’m in the top 5 queries if not the top 2 or 3. Now, what I wrote isn’t overwhelmingly interesting but I’m noticing a ton of hits from these searches along with hits from other sites directly linking here. I’ve done very little directly to influence this as I’m not going around to every non-theist site I can find and spamming my posts there. In fact, I’ve really only passed a few emails about these subjects with Hemant from friendlyatheist.com. And I only made two posts about each one on my favourite forums in order to spark debate there, not drive traffic here. This odd trend has garnered me 5,000 hits more than my highest trafficked month so far and it’s only the seventh day of the month.
Does this indicate, to me at least, that more and more people in America — and the world in a wider respect — becoming more accepting to non-theist views or are fostering their inner non-theist in a search for knowledge? I would venture a guess at a combination of both. However, I’m also so inclined to guess that given the proximity of airing dates for both programs, this may also be the driving force of the traffic increase, no pun intended.