Home -> Law Blog Directory -> Legal Commentary Blogs -> Althouse

Legal Commentary

: Althouse

Computer whizzes, help me figure something out.

I noticed I was getting huge traffic this morning ? over 3000 visitors an hour ? and it was nearly all coming from the Yahoo search for "mccain obama vogue photos" ? those exact words, in that order. Right now, Site Meter is showing 68% of my recent traffic as coming from that one search! Here's a list of all the recent searches that brought more than one visitor to my blog:

2,721 mccain obama vogue photos 68.0%
1,099 Not referred from a search engine 27.5%
18 althouse 0.5%
4 ann althouse 0.1%
2 tim russert's last interview

(I know. Who the hell is Clint Wolbert? Please don't get distracted!)

This traffic was coming from many different locations, including foreign countries. Look at the Site Meter world map and you'll see these visitors appear to be coming from all over.

Here is Site Meter's chart showing what search engines people are supposedly coming from. 67.5% of current traffic comes from Yahoo. Since 28.2% of the traffic is not coming from search engines, it looks fishy. Does this merely demonstrate the sheer power of being #1 on a particular search? I only come up 6th in a Google search for those words.

Is something funny going on at Yahoo? Is this real traffic that I can feel good about or phony traffic?

ADDED: The question is whether I've stumbled upon evidence of some sort of scheme to create the appearance of traffic on various websites. I don't suspect that this has anything to do with my blog in particular.

Full post as published by Althouse on June 15, 2008 (boomark / email).