The traffic to my website for each of the last two days (Monday and Tuesday) has more than doubled (yesterday it nearly tripled) the average daily traffic I saw for the 30 days prior to Monday.

(Note, I have recently become friends with some other bloggers around the city. Despite the appearance of popularity created by the fact that I have my own domain name, while many of them still use free blogging services, the reality is that many of them get crazy more traffic on a daily basis than I could dream of. So in the interest of preventing-or at least delaying- their realization that I’m a big fat wannabe, I’m not going to publish any hard totals here.)

Now ordinarily, this type of traffic increase would be exciting to anyone with a web presence, especially me. However, it just so happens that one of the top news stories in our country over the last few days has been that some dude went psycho over in Lancaster, PA and killed some innocent people at a school. Innocent people who practice a way of life that happens to have the same spelling as my first name.

(Note, I am refraining from actually using my name in this post.)

Coincidence? I don’t really know. What I do know is this.

In the entire month of September, a total of 697 people found this site through a web search. Of these web searches, 355 (or 51%) included my first name somewhere in the search phrase.

In the first three-and-change days of October, I am already at 409 hits from search engines. Of these, a whopping 370 hits (or 90%) include my first name somewhere in the search phrase.

In the first 3.5 days of this month, I have already received more searches which include my first name than I did in the entire month of September, and the number of these searches as a percentage of total searches has shot way up.

Now, I haven’t done any sort of in-depth analysis on the individual search phrases used to get here (I don’t have the time, nor the inclination, to comb through the hundreds of lines of data). However, I have skimmed through the data and have noticed a few more things.

-Some people are actually searching for information related to the Pennsylvania Dutch folk
-Some people are searching for information related to a TV show, whose name I took advantage of when titling this site
-Some people have legitimately been looking for this actual blog. (To you, I say “Welcome!”)
-Some people are searching for some pretty freaky stuff. Combine my first name with any of your favorite sexual/pornographic word, and it has likely been used to find this site. (For those those of you finding my site this way (for example, [first name] f***ing [opposite of boys] ), you won’t find that here. I’m sorry. For myself.)
-Some people have in fact found the website by searching for things related to the shooting a few days ago. This doesn’t appear to be a significant portion of the total [first name]-related searches, but its definitely there.

So what does this all mean? I don’t really know.

Perhaps the event from a few days ago has sparked some sort of renewal of interest in things related to those particular types of Pennsylvanians.

(This avoiding my first name thing is getting pretty annoying, by the way. I don’t know why I’m doing this, since my name is already plastered all over this site, and excluding it from this one post will likely change nothing in my search statistics.)

Perhaps the sudden increase in the use of [first name] in online news articles has somehow boosted my rankings in search engine results. This makes absolutely zero sense (in fact, I’d expect the opposite to be true), but hey, I don’t have much to go with here.

Either way, it appears that the bump in traffic is somehow tied to the tragic events that transpired a few days ago. Under those circumstances, I am not all that happy about this increase.

I’d rather see these spikes as a result of being linked more by Gawker, or even I Have Two Vaginas (Safe for work, and yes, I am linked by a blog by that name.)