prairie point

In this morning’s reading I came across a couple bloggers writing about their most popular search terms and most popular posts. It inspired me to do something I almost never do, which is check the stats for my own site.

The top five search terms for the month:

• green calculator
• burr oak acorns
• rosemary flowers
• tortoise cats
• tortoiseshell cats

There were several more variations of the acorns and tortie searches in the next five.

The first one threw me for a loop until I did my own search and came up with a not very memorable post from over four years ago linking to a quiz for rating household energy savings.

The next ones I remembered immediately. I collected bur oak acorns from a park in Dallas and on several occasions posted photos of rosemary blossoms. And of course I have posted many photos of Julie, our tortoise-shell cat. One of my posts on Julie has always ranked among my most popular posts since I wrote it.

Of course the Julie post and the acorn post were my most popular entries.

But this is interesting to me. About three years back I switched from MT to WordPress. I left my MT archives completely intact and started WordPress in its own directory. I imported all the old MT posts with their comments into WordPress. So all the old MT posts were duplicated.

All of my most popular posts are old ones written before I switched. But its always the MT version and not the WP version that is popular. I suppose this is self-perpetuating - they come up first on searches and so get clicked on more, which makes them come up first on searches. Still, you would think that after all this time the WP versions would get some hits too.

The most popular WordPress entries are predominantly ones written in the last month.

I don’t leave comments turned on for old posts, but sometimes I wish I did. I bet there would be a great list by now on a couple of these.