Hypocrisy Continued

Call this one hypocrisy continued, or maybe SEO kinda works.

I’m referencing something like three older posts here, but to sum up:  I honestly do not care about how many hits this page gets, but I started using a couple of simple Search Engine Optimization techniques recently and it seems like it works.  Also, my job title is programmer/analyst and I do enjoy getting wrapped up in statistics, even when they are meaningless and show that I’m a hypocrite.

As previously mentioned more than a couple of (dozen, probably) times, when I first started blogging (on Google’s Blogger, 2008-2012) I was posting multiple times a day.  I then, for absolutely no reason, moved over to wordpress.com (2012-2016) and continued my ridiculous posting habits.  Next I moved to medium.com (2016-2017) and I think the frequency of posts started dropping before opening up a new wordpress.com account (2017-present).  At first I was posting a lot but it dwindled considerably over time until last June 1st when I decided I was going to post every damn day again, for literally no reason.  That has turned into multiple times a day, just like it was in the beginning.

While I was using the original wordpress account I started tagging posts.  I don’t remember why or when exactly but it seemed like a good idea at the time.  At some point, possibly when I started this account, I started using post categories as well.  As my interest dwindled between lets say September 2017 and May 2019 I stopped tagging and categorizing and just posted.  After reading a reddit post on SEO a couple of weeks ago I went back to categories and tags.

Just focusing on the current wordpress account, when I look at the numbers from the start (March 2017) there was a pretty small but steady stream of hits for the first few months.  As I started losing interest, the hits went down considerably.  The numbers in the Spring of 2019 were down something like 75% from the numbers in Spring 2017 (and lets not forget, 0.25 * 4 = 1, m’kay?  We aren’t talking about lots of hits here.  Not even close).

Last June when I started posting regularly (and writing longer posts, not just throwing up random pictures) the numbers went up again.  By the end of the summer they were back to where they were at the start.  Something odd happened in October though.  I had one post (I don’t remember what it was, but it was just a random picture) got a ton of hits.  There was one day where my numbers skyrocketed (again, for me skyrocketing doesn’t mean the same thing as it does for let’s say Mashable, or the New York Times, or any real site that isn’t just some stupid fat putz mouthing off).  The counts for October 2019 were the highest they had been since the account was created.

Two days ago January 2020 passed October 2019.  There are still 2+ days to go this month and I’m already quite a bit over that previous high.  Again, before you start thinking ol’ Robbie should monetize or any bullshit like that, we’re only slightly above single digit numbers here, m’kay?  Never lose site of that.  It’s pretty important.

So there I was, looking at the Stats and Insights page (wordpress.com users know what I’m talking about) and seeing the current month as my most viewed month in almost three years.  Cool!  Then I thought to myself, I wonder how the numbers on the first wordpress.com account looked.  I logged out and tried to log back in as the original user.  I couldn’t remember the original user’s email address (I don’t use my main personal email address for any of my wordpress.com accounts).  I had to dig through my email to try and find the right user name (I don’t use my main email address, but I do forward all emails from the burner accounts to my main email, so they were there for me to dig out).  Once I found it I had to trudge through the depths of my pea brain’s memory to find the password.  I found that too, eventually.  No need to reset it.

Two things surprised me.  First, despite not having touched that account since 2016 it still gets occasional hits.  Not a lot, just a couple each month.  I didn’t expect that though it does make sense as I can see some posts that were ported from that page to this one still get hit here.  Whatever.  Second, the numbers from 2012-2016 weren’t all that different from my numbers over the last seven months.  On average they were higher back then, but not too much higher.  There were outliers though.  January 2020 is the highest hit count for any month on the current account.  There were 4-5 months on the old account where the hits spiked in a gigantic way.  We’re talking triple the hits we’re seeing today.  More than triple.

The moral of the story is, sure it’s fun to see the numbers on this page growing a little… but don’t get cocky, kid.

QED.