Over 4 million, and climbing fast

 

I have only just noticed, but this blog has now gone past 4 million page views, with almost 100,000 page views on 28th August alone.  That is really weird -- why so many page views on that particular day?  On digging deeper into the Blogger statistics, I see that the viewings were not just of the latest posts, but of all sorts of posts across a wide range of topics, some of them from many years ago.  There was a similar spike on 11th August (102,000 views) and another on 21 July (75,000 views).   If anybody has any insights into the reasons for these strange spikes, I will be interested to hear what you have to say.

Anyway, many thanks to my faithful readers -- your support is greatly appreciated.

One of the things that I think might have happened over the last couple of years is that the algorithms used by Google and other search engines have picked up on the popularity of the blog in the fields of geomorphology, glaciology, archaeology and geology and have as a consequence started placing it high in the lists of articles that come up in response to searches.  

If there really is a sort of geometric progression going on, we should hit the 5 million mark in no time at all.........

PS.  I have been doing some homework, and have discovered that sometimes you can get "an invasion of the bots" -- God knows what they are, but they are not human.  Maybe I have had a few invasions?  I could dig very deeply by using Google Analytics, but I don't want to do that because you have to open yourself up to a tremendous invasion of privacy by Google, which knows too much already.

I don't do SEO (search engine optimisation) on this blog because then you get preoccupied with keywords and marketing / PR tactics and so forth.  Life is too short for all that sort of stuff.  In any case, I am not a commercial blog, unlike many others, where the blog is essentially a shop front for a range of products.  I have just one product, namely my book called "The Stonehenge Bluestones" -- but I don't get many sales through the blog.  So I will go on as I started -- putting up posts on topics that interest me as and when I can find the time..........

PPS.  Done yet more research, and have discovered very high levels of page views from Vietnam and Brazil!  Apparently this is down to robots or "bots" which crawl the internet for content (for example relating to "Stonehenge") which is then redistributed via other search engines, web-sites and blogs.  No doubt there is a lot of AI translation into other languages going on too.  Most of the consumers or customers are not in Vietnam and Brazil!  So in one sense this is piracy, or theft of intellectual property.  No point in getting upset about that -- we all know that once something is published on the web, it is out there, and nobody can call it back again or claim breaches of copyright.  But on the up-side, it means that many thousands of people who might not have been aware of my work on this blog will now have individual posts brought to their attention, in their own language, probably on page one of a search listing.  So educational materials and research that might have otherwise been hidden in the dark are now out there, in the open, in the light of day!