Early Sunday morning, literally a few minutes after it happened, I posted an entry about Ashlee Simpson’s lip syncing incident on Saturday Night Live. (It’s two entries below this one – or just click here). Because of the time it happened, after midnight Eastern time, it got very little ‘conventional’ news coverage until Sunday evening.
In the meantime, Google was busy indexing the Internet… including this site. All of a sudden, geofffox.com was listed up near the top when people searched to find out what had happened.
Because of this one event, this has been a very unusual day on this website. Of all my October 2004 traffic, half has come today! In fact, I have delivered nearly twenty times my normal number of pages, and the day’s not over yet.
So, what have I learned from this? Certainly the power of Google. I always knew it drove Internet traffic, but never to the extent I see today. And I didn’t even write my page to be optimized for Google. There are ways it could have been presented which would have gotten me more search hits.
It’s also obvious that many of the entertainment sites people depend on are really Monday through Friday affairs with minimal or no weekend staffing. Yesterday, once I realized the traffic had begun, I looked at all the conventional entertainment news sites and found virtually nothing on this story. I haven’t looked tonight, but I’ll bet Entertainment Tonight, Access Hollywood and the others led with Ashlee’s problem.
It will be interesting to see how quickly the story of her scheduled ‘live’ performance tonight is reported. I’m guessing this one will get online a lot sooner, and by sites that have more ‘schlep’ than I have.
If you are here for the Ashlee story, thanks for coming by. Take a look around. Squeeze the produce. Post a comment. Come again any time. I’m thrilled you’re here.