Sunday 15 May 2011

A Curious Phenomenon

Having just checked my stats I noticed something rather strange. Zama: The Cauldron Born, is an article about goblinoids in my twenty-year old home-brew fantasy game world (built to work with any system, by the way, but specifically with D&D and RuneQuest in mind). This article has had more hits that any other article this year. In fact, despite having been up for just a few weeks, it's nearly as popular as my Houri and Barbarian character class rules for OSRIC.
What's strange about this you wonder? All those views and not one comment. Not one.
Not one.
Ever.

Does anyone else ever come across this situation with their most popular posts?

6 comments:

scottsz said...

Zama is a company that makes carburetors. Cauldron as a search term brings up Google shopping results.

The Cauldron post contains a lot of images which could ping up in Google's image search.

Both search engine terms contain a lot of 'juice'.

It may be that the post in question has a lot of search engine 'access', so it's just very reachable.

Dangerous Brian said...

Ah well. That would explain it. Thanks. Who ever would have thought there'd be a company named "Zama".

Nook said...

I've recently experienced my first real surge in views, with a post getting +500 views in 24 hours, and not one person has left a comment.

Dangerous Brian said...

Wow. What post was that? The "Judge a man by his enemies one?"

scottsz said...

An additional thought: Some 'visits' may not be regular, human viewers. I'm not sure how Google's Blogger tracks traffic.

Where I work I had to build a 'visit counter' system that recorded the User Agent string. I found a surprising percentage of 'visitors' were simply automated search scripts.

It's also been my experience that if a post is totally 'aligned' with my own observations, I'm less likely to comment. If it has a content resource or a cluster of links about a particular topic, I'm likely to bookmark it but not comment on it.

christian said...

I've ad that, especially with my zines. Hundreds of downloads and no comments. Then again, I'm not sure what number of downloads are bots. Curious...