For some strange reason, every few months, the viewership of this blog tends to make a sudden jump. It just did it again, over the past few weeks–I’m now getting about 950 daily visitors on weekdays, and about 800 on weekend days, each up a few hundred per day over a month ago. The monthly total for September is likely to break 12,000.

At first I thought it was spammers, both blog comment spammers and referral spammers, and to be certain they have been on the rise–but they haven’t made that big a difference in the ‘unique visitors’ column. When the spam surged in June, the overall numbers did not.

It turns out that mostly the changes are from Google. Referrals from Google have, for some reason, doubled over the past few months, from over 4000 to over 8000, and that’s the only figure that jumped the same time overall numbers did. And it’s not search engines in general, but just Google.

Not that I am at all displeased–Google is the #1 search engine, and they have always sent more people my way than anywhere else. But it makes me wonder, why do these things happen so suddenly? What’s the equation? The only thing I can guess without research is that there must be thresholds involved; that if the total data on a site exceeds a certain amount, it gets ranked that much higher. And this blog’s archives are indeed getting rather thick.