This month I experienced my first viral experience. But don’t worry, I haven’t been exposed to sickly toddlers or infested air conditioning. I have in fact witnessed a sudden surge in the popularity of This Little Thing Called Life, attributed to search traffic directed to my Life Changing Decisions post. And I’m talking about a jump from 100 or so daily views to a whopping 5,861 views over two days.

Whilst this may seem like a welcome boost and a testament to impressive ‘organic’ search marketing, I wonder if all is what it seems? Whilst I am delighted that most of my older posts continue to attract readers via natural search traffic, such sudden spikes for no obvious reason, do seem rather odd. Especially when they come via an image search term!

How many of these impressions were simple click on-click off users who didn’t read more than a line or two? Alas, I fear that most of them were. There simply wasn’t much of an increase in views of other posts to think otherwise. And I can’t think of any reason why so many people would all of a sudden want to read a personal post about making important decisions.

More recently I also received another large boost in traffic directed to The Real Life Popeye post. However, this is much more understandable, as the bicep-buster was back in the news again. Plus, I’m talking about a more realistic surge of 949 views over two days this time.

So I think that, putting my ego aside, I should label the 5,861 views as a weird anomaly, and completely ignore them. Instead I will view the 598 daily views (part of the ‘Popeye peak’) as my new daily high. Thoroughly respectable for a blog post if you ask me.

But I wonder what caused those 5,861 impressions? Any ideas?