Natural disasters are good for search engine results

The cooling weather means fewer people are reading bicycle blogs in the Northern Hemisphere, so traffic has dropped off significantly here at Cyclelicious. I’ve discovered that a local disaster does wonders for website traffic, though. It even earned me a link from a high ranking website (and thanks for that, Jordan!).

I posted a note about the San Jose Earthquake within minutes of the quake. That evening, my unique visitor count tripled from my previous day’s count. I suppose I could write something either profound or sophomoric on our need to connect with other human beings in a dramatic shared experience and how Web 2.0 enables this human interaction in powerful new ways, but I’m just a computer nerd who likes to ride a bicycle.

The technology of the web held up just fine in Silicon Valley. My cellphone didn’t work, but Twitter, Flickr, Blogger and the World Wide Web in general all stayed up and running, along with my Internet phone service. The Internet is descended from “ARPANET“, a U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency project. While the Internet would not survive a world-ending nuclear exchange, it hummed along with nary a hiccup during the quake in the heart of Silicon Valley. It helped, of course, that damage was limited to falling merchandise and hundreds of thousands of library books.

While I’m talking web stats, Alta Bikes is still in my top ten . Kirsten Gum remains a favorite at number four on the list; there’s quite a bit of interest in the Chanel bicycle; and more than a few people are still looking at Interbike 2007 information.

2 Comments

  1. Interesting. I sometimes look at daily hits, but I hardly ever look at wht people are searching for. Maybe I should take a look from time to time.

  2. Interesting. I sometimes look at daily hits, but I hardly ever look at wht people are searching for. Maybe I should take a look from time to time.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.