06/24/08
From time to time (oh, who are we kidding? DAILY) we take a look at who's looking at us, who's linking to us, and why people find us by accident. Here are some observations as we contemplate our insignificance.
People get to us in a number of ways: searches, bookmarks links from other websites, links stored in e-mails, RSS feeds, etc. When those people come here from somewhere that has a URL, we can see where they came from. A vast majority of hits to this site come via "no referrer", which we take to mean that someone got here from a link in e-mail or a bookmark. We like that. Bookmark our site, please! Did your friend send you an e-mail with our URL? Save that e-mail. When the revolution comes, it may very well save your life.
When people come here from search, our stats tell us what they searched for. Know what our top search referrals come from?
Poughkeepsied More than half our referred hits come from Google searches for the word "Poughkeepsied" or the phrase "Charlotte Poughkeepsied in her pants." I haven't seen it, but I'm guessing that's one of the most memorably funny lines from the Sex and the City movie. Alternately, perhaps I'm discovering that scatalogical references to cities in New York are now driving the zeitgeist. Can Analbany be far behind? (Heh. She said "behind".)
"A slight squeeze on the hooter..." Almost all the rest of our search hits come from searches for this line from Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. Weird. Apparently Dick Van Dyke saying "hooter" is an international obsession.
Brat Pack A significant number (well, more than five) of our search hits have come from searches for Timothy Hutton, Sean Penn, and, of course, Kevin Bacon. ( We're relatively sure this doesn't raise our Bacon Number, but it's neat.) We guess from this that the 40-something age group is trying to relive its youth through movies.
Looking for a little context, we looked up the top Google searches right now. According to Google Trends Labs, these are the current top ten searches (as of 06/20/08): 1. graham bunn 2. vince mcmahon 3. monkey munch 4. emile norman 5. mothman 6. kai doh maru 7. don imus 8. wet seal 9. weeds season 4 episode 2 10. callies biscuits Clearly we have a lot to do if we want to appear off one of these searches.
What's interesting to us is that we turn up on Google searches at all. We break all the rules of good SEO practice. We should be driving people away.
Apropos of nothing, our favorite search hit comes from Hungarian Google: Boogie Nights at the Museum comes up as one result for the search phrase "like a ready to the right now right now." It's like some kind of crazy Magyar hiphop. Oh, yeah.
In other news, we experienced a brief bump in hits around the time we sent TrackBack links to Cute Overload. We will try this again, for we are whores. Also, we love Cute Overload and the new addition to their staff, Not That Mike The Other Mike.
Our efforts to get attention via a Twitter presence has so far yielded nothing, but we don't care. Twitter is fun.
The most successful thing (in terms of bringing us audience and satisfaction) we've done so far is simply connecting with other blog writers. Turns out, blog writers like connecting with people. Who knew? In doing so, we've connected with some cool bloggers, like the brilliant woman at the heart of The Ladder Herald, the folks at Pajiba, Cormac Brown, and Scott Monty.
On the whole, we at My Left Footloose don't much like people. Unlike movies, they do not like it when you mock them. But we're meeting some bloggers we like, just enough to keep us from gunning the whole lot of humanity down, and some of them put cute pictures of animals on the Web.
Oh come on now, plenty of people like to be mocked. Its the backbone of America, mocking people. Just look at insult comics...
Posted by: Marc | October 15, 2009 at 07:23 PM
weh site bookmarked and email to my contacts, just kidding but the bookmarked part is true, great post by the way. constantly monitoring your sites traffic is a good practice.
Posted by: seo california | December 16, 2009 at 04:29 PM