I bounced back in a big way in January with a smidgeon over 55,000 hits, thanks in large part to a gazillion search engine referrals for Ashley McElhiney. At a guess, I'd say I'd have had a more modest 45,000 hits or so without that. Why she was such a popular search engine request I can't say, but it drove me some traffic, that's for sure.

Unfortunately, a lot of my top referrers for the month were spam sites, something which is continuing in February and which is crowding out some real referrers. I have no idea why any spammer would think this is a good thing for them to do, since the only place these URLs show up is on pages that require a login, but they're there and they're really annoying. I even got a bunch of spam referrals that appear to be spoofing a legitimate blog. Go figure on that one. At some point, I may try to implement this solution for referral spam, but it's low on my to-do list right now.

Be that as it may, I am as always glad you, the actual readers, stopped by. That's what matters, and it's why I do these posts every month. Thank you all very much. Top (real) referrers and search terms are beneath the More link.

Aggregators, collections, indices, etc
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296:  http://blo.gs/
242:  http://www.bloglines.com

Weblog referrers

================

1938:  Daily Kos


1696:  Political Animal


723:   Atrios


567:   TAPPED


320:   The Burnt Orange Report


141:   The Sideshow


128:   Pandagon




Top search terms

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#reqs: search term

-----: -----------

 7044: ashley mcelhiney

  497: ryan pitylak

  468: extreme home makeovers

  364: diane zamora

  332: park dietz

  327: schlitterbahn galveston

  317: real men of genius

  293: whfs

  276: naugas

  276: buy girl scout cookies

  221: american idol tryouts

  218: ryan samuel pitylak

  153: klol

  141: bill burkett

  129: dr park dietz

  129: rusty yates

  124: trans texas corridor

  120: ugly people

  109: off the kuff