HAPPY NEW YEAR, BLOG; welcome to 2014!

At the beginning of every new year, WordPress sends you a summary of your blog’s activity from the previous year. This includes stuff like, how many total views you had in 2013, what your most popular posts were, which post got the most comments, what was your busiest traffic day of the year, etc.  It also includes a map telling where all your views are coming from, for example, this year my blog had views from 74 different countries. NEAT.

Some stats are more interesting than others, however.

For most people, the point of a blog is to have people read it. Otherwise, it’s just a diary and you should probably be hiding it under your mattress and not posting it on the internet. Now, most of those “most people” will pretty much take views anyway they can get them. Say, if I happened to mention taxidermied mice for a joke in a post, that may accidentally put me in search engine results for people looking up stuffed rodents. This in turn might bring people to my blog who are looking for how-to articles, or photos, or something pertaining to taxidermy that I don’t actually have. This is disappointing for that searcher, but good for me, because I’ve gained at least one view (maybe more if that person decided to click around a bit). It’s kind of like the idiom “There’s no such thing as bad press.” However, I now beg to differ.

In this year’s summary, I got some terrible news. One of the top searches that brought people to my blog was “ugly brunettes.” This is very disturbing to me because, why do people want to look up ugly brunettes? Is this a trend? Is there a prize for whoever finds the ugliest brunette? AM I THE UGLIEST?! Now, thankfully, I am aware that I am not ugly. Or at least not the ugliest (which, is kind of worse when you think about; I mean if you’re going to go for something, you should really go all the way), so I can take it all in stride.

What I’m trying to say is, for my 2014 New Year’s Resolution, I am going to hack into Google and edit their search results so that only flattering searches land people on my page. I think I will start with “clever with good grammar” and “can bake.”

 

See my post called Self Esteem for why this is probably happening.