Here's a story that might resonate with all you bloggers who check your stats addictively. It's been clear for a while that certain posts receive way more hits than others: in particular my introductory
Willows piece from last fall and my "40 Characters" entry from two years ago have proved perennially popular. Obviously the primary reason is image content - Google searches yield hits on certain pictures I included and users who click through find themselves on my site. Also certain posts - like the Characters one - were promoted or linked up at various sites (though it's fallen off lately, the picture gallery meme and "Reading the Movies" rode high for a while on these links as well).
Yet there's one post that, lately, has been crushing all the others, and for the life of me I can't figure out why. It's a Remembering the Movies entry from October 22, 2010, with
L'Age d'Or the highlighted film and
Malena and
The Magnificent Seven among the other movies mentioned. This is before I took my new, flashier approach to the series so there aren't a whole lot of images. None of the titles would necessarily be expected to generate lots of hits - it's not like
The Godfather or
Star Wars is featured.
Yet, especially in the past month or so, no other single piece has been nearly as popular. Finally I have to ask, what's going on here? Has one person bookmarked the page and used it as an entry to the site ever since? Is there a Monica Belluci fan who uses it for motivational purposes every day? In fact, when I look at the "traffic sources" option, there are no incoming links that stand out, so I can't imagine one person is generating all this activity.
I'm genuinely curious, so if any of you have looked at this post for a particular reason - aside from stumbling across it while otherwise using my blog - can you let me in on the secret?