It is a strange thing.
My blog statistics have shown a strange development lately: most of my blog “hits” are originating from the People’s Republic of China.
Why is that?
I have no idea. I really don’t.
I never really know what is going on with respect to how visitors arrive to my webpage. True, I can see who is visiting which page and from what country, as well as which search engine referred them. But that is about all.
And I never wanted to do a “deep dive” into search engine optimization or whatever. The black arts of trying to “game” SEOs towards getting more traffic to your website I would leave to commercial websites interested in making money. My blog was a hobby. I was content with whoever might stumble across my website. I didn’t care about driving traffic or making money.
But still. It is interesting.
Why am I getting more hits from mainland China than from my own country?
A couple of months ago one particular page “blew up” with almost all the traffic coming from India over a span of a week. Was some professor in India there directing his students to this page for some reason? I never found out.
I wrote a short “in memoriam” for Norah Vincent, and it has consistently gotten much traffic from Google. Are “suicide tourists” researching how to commit legal euthanasia in Switzerland and so are referenced by Google to that page to do research? That would seem the logical answer. But I will never know. It is vaguely worrying: I never meant this post to be an indirect access point for the suicidally depressed to find Pegasos.
At any rate, now for the second time in two months my “Mother and Son” is being accessed by relatively large numbers of visitors via the popular Chinese search engine “Baidu.” Strange. Back in the early Aughts my entire domain was blacklisted in Communist China because of an article I wrote way back then. But now the Web is so much bigger, and my domain so much more lost amidst the vast Internet noise, that I don’t think any government officials in China knows or cares about my webpage. And so the search engine gods at Baidu, with their unique search algorithms, are somehow sending users to this page.
Why?
I don’t know. And I will most likely never know. The search engines themselves won’t say anything to me about what they are doing and why with my webpage. They aren’t talking. For content creators what happens behind the curtain with search engine results is a great mystery.
Maybe there are so many users in populous mainland China searching the Web that I get an unusually large number of hits from there, and that explains it. But why then is this page popular for a week or two in China, and then the hits lessen, and then increase again. And why are none of my others postings garnering much attention from China?
I have no idea.
Who knows how and why the search engine gods send queries to this site or that on the Internet? It is like a black art, this skill in “Search Engine Optimization.” Conservations around is will get quite technical. So I have never paid it much attention.
I would much rather spend my best energies designing quality content than getting all wonky and trying to optimize my SEO ranking to increase traffic to my site. I refused to advertise my postings all over social media to get more attention and increased “hits.” I want to prioritize the human aspect of hosting a blog, not the technology associated with it. Keep one eye on what is happening online, Richard, but not two eyes. Again, the vital question of what is important and unimportant in life. I will try to focus much more on the prose posed on my website than on the technology underlying it. I hope to be more an honest writer, less a tech monkey. I try to keep in mind the point of the entire project.
Because search engines and online popularity wax and wane over time. The technologies change.
But my website, and its window into my mind and heart, is a constant. This remains unchanged.
A continuous online presence for 27 years, 8 months and 2 days – so grateful for it.
Amen.
