In my earlier post celebrating 10 years of blogging, I promised to share my top 10 posts from the last 10 years (based on page views). I’m not really surprised by the results. But, that’s because I watch my traffic stats on a regular basis. You might be a bit surprised though. The top results are not what you’d probably expect. In reverse order, here are my top 10 posts from the last 10 years based on page views (with a bit of commentary along the way):
10. I had cancer… Wait… what?
I’m a bit surprised that this post made the top 10 as I just posted it a month ago. But, it was a pretty alarming story and a lot of my friends and family were aware that I was sick, but they didn’t know all of the details. So, this summary post was shared far and wide. (and, everyone loves a good story of doom and gloom, right?) 🙂
9. Dawkins Part 4: The Objective Roots of Morality
My Dawkins series has received a lot of traffic over the last few years. Atheism is a popular topic and my objections to Dawkins’ The God Delusion have received a lot of traffic (and hateful comments). And, my book The God Solution has generated a fair amount of traffic as well. It is no surprise that some of my Dawkins writing has made the top 10.
8. Should atheists have children?
This is the most controversial post on my blog. I am not surprised that it made the top 10, but I am a bit surprised that it wasn’t higher on the list.
7. Is there any difference between pacifism and nonresistance?
This post was a response to a reader comment. I do get a fair amount of referral traffic from search engines, and I suspect that this is the source for a lot of the traffic to this post. (I haven’t done an exhaustive analysis of the relationship between referrers and my posts so I can’t say for certain).
6. Dawkins Part 7: The Slippery Slope of Abortion
This is a perfect storm of traffic generated by an interesting blog series (I had plenty of readers during the time when I ran this series) and great SEO. I regularly see high traffic to this post due to the popular keywords associated with this page: Dawkins, abortion & atheism.
5. AGAPE – unconditional love
Here’s where things get interesting. I am constantly surprised by the amount of traffic that my series on love has generated over the years. Although it wasn’t the intent, these posts continue to be huge SEO traffic generators for my site. My site consistently gets listed in the first page of search results for search terms like “philia love”, “examples of eros love”and “types of philia”. I see plenty of traffic to these posts on love on a daily basis.
4. The Atheist Delusion – Why I don’t agree with Richard Dawkins in 10 parts
I dedicated a great deal of time writing a response to Dawkins’ book, “The God Delusion“. I even wrote a book on this subject! Therefore, I’m relieved that my Dawkins posts are listed in the top 10 for my blog.
3. Dawkins Part 3: Problems with Organized Religion
Organized religion is an easy target for atheists and theists alike. There is lots of common ground in this discussion. Thus, this post really resonated with a lot of people. And, I do regularly see some SEO juice via Google referrals coming to the site by people searching for “problems with organized religion”.
2. EROS – romantic love
SEO generates a lot of traffic for this post. I’m the top beneficiary of this search query: “examples of eros love”, which appears to be a very popular search term.
1. PHILIA – friendship love
It seems that plenty of people are looking for love on the internet. My series on love has generated a lot of traffic to my site, and my post on “PHILIA – friendship love” has generated over twice as much traffic as the second most trafficked post (EROS – romantic love). Searching for “examples of philia love” delivers this post as the top search result on Google. This wasn’t my intent when I wrote these posts, but it has become clear that these posts are seen by Google as great reference sites for these terms. I won’t complain!
Who would have thought that my posts on love would dominate the top of this list? I’ve been watching my traffic over the long term and my posts on love regularly generate a lot of traffic, so I wasn’t surprised that they came out on top. But, without knowing my stats, I would have been very surprised to see these posts at the top of the list.
What do you think? Any surprises? Any questions? And, more importantly, what can I learn and do differently after examining my top 10 posts from the last 10 years?
Todd
Todd H Dow 