Strange Visitations

As I've mentioned before, I like to check the Site Meter logs to see how many people have visited my blog (and my other web sites), what countries they're from, and so on. One of the things I can see is what the referring sites are—that is, where someone clicked a link to get here. The vast majority of links to my blog—or at least those which are identifiable—are either from my regular web site or my writing course, or from search engines. It's the search engine clicks that are interesting, because they show me what kinds of queries land people on my blog.

Lately, hands-down, the winner has been Daisy the Goose. I cannot believe how many people have searched for the Daisy the Flying Goose story and wound up at my blog. There has, in fact, been an upswing in visitors the last couple of weeks, and at least part of that is attributable to the goose. Another perennial search favorite is information about snakes, such as someone recently looking for "cool names for snakes." Google searches for images of "girls wrestling" are pretty common. I wondered at first if they were people looking for mud wrestling or whatever, but then realized they were coming from search pages that actually showed the images of high school wrestling, so I'm guessing it really is mostly people genuinely interested in girls participating in the sport of folk wrestling. More than a few people come looking for articles on intelligent design or "will people steal my story ideas."

Hardly anybody ever clicks through on the ads, by the way. After two years, I finally racked up enough earnings to get my first check for a hundred big ones. (I mistook the envelope the check was in for junk mail and nearly put it through the shredder.)

The blogosphere's a funny place. But you already knew that, right?