If you go to Daytop’s Top list right now you’ll see that some obscure site has stolen the number one position by placing the exact same line and link on literally scores of web sites. It’s a total sham, but by doing this the Site Traffic Thief got me to check it out. (All it is is a sign-up page for some service, in Spanish! The hottest site on the Internet? Yeah, right.)

But now thousands of the curious are clicking on that link and site traffic must be through the stratosphere.

I got really annoyed back in April when someone used my site for similar purposes. I put up a post saying what a good job sarswatch.org was doing in chronicling the disease, and I awoke the next morning to see tons of site traffic, all to this dinky post. It turned out Tim someone who I won’t mention had five other sites along with sarswatch and posted on all of them about what a great post they’d find on pekingduck. IOW, he linked to my post about his post to direct the traffic to sarswatch.

So I was #1 on daypop! I was awash in site traffic, all of which was promptly directed away from my site to the the traffic thief’s site. And it showed me just how easy it is to manipulate traffic and create gross misimpressions.

Not at all in the same category, but somewhat related in that it involves intentionally manipulating traffic our way, is the issue of using our blog headlines to suck in site traffic from google and the other search engines. Adam has put up a very funny and unashamed post on how he does it, and I find myself doing it, too.

This is a recent thing for me. It struck me that after putting up a post with a cliche in the headline — specifically, “Defamation of Character” and “Pushing the Envelope” — I drew zillions of hits, probably from students seeking the derivation of these phrases. So now I find myself almost automatically thinking of keyword-rich headlines. Once bitten by the site traffic bug, there’s no turning back. You want to inhale it, more and more and more. There is never enough. The more you get the more you want.

But aren’t we really fooling only ourselves? If the searchers just come to your site for a split-second and then see your post is irrelevant to their search and flee, is it anything to boast about? Not really, and yet it does soothe the ego to see those rising numbers….

Adam in the aforementioned (and linked!) post says this more poetically and concisely than I do:

Yum, munch! Daypop oughta love this. Snap, crackle! Link whoring is fun… It’s posted and updated and there’s comments to read and I haven’t checked Sitemeter in almost three minutes. Crack, pop! There goes my neck. Hit, smack! My girlfriend is impatient… I found a new site but I’m not on his blogroll, a trackback ping just might do the trick. Boink, splat! Masturbating in cyberspace. Slip, slide! My hand’s spollen from wankin’… There is no judge for my writing skills /’xept the egregious number on the technorati. Gawd, damn! I got more than he. Hut, hike! Don’t know which sport I’m playin’… I joined a group blog but I contribute only a pic so that I might rank higher on obscure searches. Clink, klang! My most hits are from google. Sling, slang! It’s all in the keywords… I shoot on over to a reference site where it told me how to manipulate searches. Woosh, wham! My name in lights. Suck, splat! Everyone’s doin’ it…

(I think somebody put too much MSG in his jiaozi.)

Site traffic. The blogger’s raison d’etre, the single tangible entity to which we can point to validate our grubby blogger existence. Mine’s bigger than yours. “Ha-ha,” as Nelson would say.

Oh, and did I mention my site traffic is WAY UP lately?