An odd thing happened to the Flyer website over the weekend: 130,000 people went to this June 25th, 2010 post in Memphis Gaydar by Bianca Phillips. The subject? An ice-cream social at First Congregrational Church benefiting the Tennessee Equality Project. That’s a LOT of web traffic for such an obscure and out-of-date posting.
So what happened? We’re not really sure. Sunday was International Ice Cream Sundae Day (who knew?), but why would so many of the world’s “ice cream sundae” googlers hit our site? And why was so much of the traffic from Asia? Even the three comments on the post are recent and appear to be from people not particularly proficient in English.
We’re not complaining, of course. Any weird spike in traffic only helps our numbers — and our web revenue. And there are companies out there that specialize in what’s called “black hat” practices, schemes to game Google search results. Here’s a good article from The New York Times on the phenomenon, and how J.C. Penney made it work for weeks.
Like I said, we don’t really know what happened, but it doesn’t hurt to be prepared for next year, so here goes: Ice Cream Sundae Porn Sex Boobs Cleavage. And Butt.
