For some inexplicable reason, my post on Spike Jonze’s movie Where the Wild Things Are keeps getting an inordinate number of hits, seemingly from casual passersby. These are people from all over the world, coming (sometimes) in droves to that one blog post, generally dropping into this blog directly from Google, and I can’t find any connecting link to an outside source that would account for all that traffic.
It’s old, and it wasn’t a particularly substantive post, even compared to some of the other film reviews I’ve posted here. So why all the interest?
Adrian, this happened to a friend of mine once. It turned out that it was the image of Pittsburgh he had in the post that was attracting the blog hits. I did a Google Image search for “Where the Wild Things Are” and the image in your post is located in, I think, the seventh row of images. It’s certain that the image is getting lots of hits; when you click it, it takes the searcher to your site. If you’re looking for traffic in the future, now you know the bait!
Ha – how interesting… I just did an image search and the top image (which is the one I’m guessing you found as well) appeared in the sixth row of images, but it’s linked to someone else’s site (a guy by the name of Andy Walker). After I clicked on that one and then refreshed my search, the image moved up to the fifth row. Could my single click have altered its spot in the Google algorithm results? And could Google be alternating between sources for the same images, so as not to repeat the image in its search results?
I’m sure you’re onto something here, even if the source sites aren’t identical…
I keep getting the same results in my image search and refreshes. On my screen, it’s the seventh row far right image. Always links to your blog (it’s the image at the top of your post). Here’s the link: http://bit.ly/dKFeoh
You’re right, Tom, that one does link to my blog. The image comes up as #45 on that Google Image results page (eighth row on my screen) — which means there must be a lot of people looking for images from the film (or book) and then clicking through a pretty substantial number of those images (since this one isn’t all that different from most of the others). That’s interesting… and I guess it would account for the traffic, though it’s still surprising.
Cheers, Adrian
I know my kids like Where The Wild Things Are a lot, and now that they can use the computers with sophistication, I have seen them looking on google images for the story, and they have bookmarked your review of Spike Jonze’s film. Heck, I even had one my readers on my neti pot blog email your review. I guess it kind of hits the nail on the head. Me, I just wonder why those wild things don’t come out and attack during the day…they seem so ferocious, yet they are kind and shy.
wild events people vs. people. everything is easy and beautiful things that attract attention. Different thoughts about this issue are written in comments. It’s a beautiful article as a whole.