What's Trending?

It is easy to be seduced by statistics. I know several friends who have websites and blogs and are rather obsessed with their web statistics. They are always checking to see how many hits the site gets or what pages or posts are most popular or what search terms are being used to find them. Social media has encouraged this with Likes and Retweets and Reposts. Our smartphones love to send us notifications that someone has engaged with some piece of our content.

I got this alert in December about another blog of mine.

Your page is trending up

Your page clicks increased by more than 1,000% over the usual daily average of less than 1 click.

https://poetsonline.blogspot.com/2010/12/moving-into-winter-solstice-poems.html

Possible explanations for this trend could be:

• Modifications you did to your page's content.
• Increased interest in a trending topic covered by the page.

Of course, I am happy that people found this post from 2010 and are still reading it and hopefully enjoying it. Google's "possible explanations" for this are both correct, as I did update the page this month and the topic of the Winter Solstice was probably trending across the web as we slipped into the new season.

I do glance at my websites' analytics occasionally. I have ten sites and blogs that I do, so it can't be a very regular thing. I do like to look at the end of the year at each of them to see what has been happening. I also have a half dozen clients that I do websites for and they are always interested in their stats.