My Author Name on Google

I thought it might be interesting to review how many pages are connected to my author name on Google during November 2011, since I had three online publications that month. Would the possible links to my name rise accordingly?

Back in 2008, right after my first online publication in seven years, I had about four pages of links to me (in other words thirty to forty links). By 2009, it was about seven pages. In 2010, it was around fourteen pages. And it's tended to over around that number since. Note how added publications actually seemed to drop the number of pages of links sometimes:

Internet Viewing Hits 4

Here's another look at what I've been looking at online. For the last ninety days:

And here's just the last thirty days:

Website Viewing Hits 3

So here's the viewing habits for the past month. It looks quite similar to last month, and given that it represents a wider scope of time, it's probably on a part with the usual totals. Dating personals and Web ads dropped off, it appears, in favor of business and search engines. Not sure why business showed up so high this time. I'll do another survey in a few weeks.

Website Viewing Hits 2

Okay, so a couple of weeks have passed since I created that first chart. Now let's look and see if things are pretty much the same as it was for the first week:

So it appears that the subjects of the Websites have changed quite a bit in the past few weeks and that, given the larger time span, the list of types of sites has diversified significantly.

Website Viewing Hits

So I have software that tells me where I've been and breaks it down by category. I don't know quite how the categories are established, since I'm certain I don't spend 4 percent of my time in "chat" (the last time I chatted online was probably five months ago). I suspect every ad a site serves up gets to be part of the categorizing, so I don't actually have to go to the page (e.g., if I'm in gmail, the g-chat being available, even if unused, perhaps gets categorized).

Anyway, here's how my viewing apparently breaks down for the past week:

My Personal Website Hits

I maintain several websites and blogs. On several of them, I run Google Analytics to calibrate hit count and to see what pages are popular and how users are finding my site. Recently, I updated my personal website. That's the one that basically has links to virtually all of the other sites. It's about me, as opposed to being about charts I create or things I read. I updated in part because the look of the site had been the same since about 2008 when I created the site. Also, a couple of items in the navigation bar stopped working, and I couldn't figure out why.

Looking over the hits per month, however, I am surprised to see that my personal website has actually had a small increase in average hits per months over the years, up to about twenty (you can discount February--the one with the most hits near the end of the line in the chart--it is an anomaly caused by my own multiple viewing of the site in trying to fix it). Where are these people coming from? Apparently, some of them are finding me via my thesis, which is posted on the personal site (hidden near the top of my vita page). It's about the short stories of Jayne Anne Phillips and offers critical commentary on a few more-obscure stories that is probably not available elsewhere; I'm glad if the thesis is of use to anyone.

Anyway, here's how the hits have increased through the years:

Google Search Finds

Around June 21, I did a search for my writing name in quote marks to see what would show up and how often. (A search for my everyday name without quotes would be interesting to chart as well, though I'd have to limit the data to the first ten pages or so, since the names are so common as to give an huge number of returns. Something tells me the first folks on there would be Jon Davies the weatherman and Jon Davies the anthropologist. I think I show up somewhere down between number 10 and 30 on some social network, which rather surprises me, since there's not much reason to include me there.)

Anyway, here's how the breakdown appears:
Or to put it in another way (as a percentage):
My name is most connected to a story that appeared in Stymie magazine. I find that interesting because it's not an easy story to get to, but Stymie, a literary magazine on sports, apparently is well connected to various sporting sites, and so my name is now connected to sites wherein you can buy basketballs and jock straps, which is certainly what I think of when I think of me.

What I find most interesting is how some journals really do a great job of getting their name out in search results. Bull, for instance, which published "The Heart Is a Strong Instrument," tweets new stories, blogs about them, Facebooks them, and so on, so that the story isn't just being hit up at its site but at all these companion sites. "The Next Superstar," which appeared in Battered Suitcase, is also listed a lot because the folks at the Suitcase cross-publish the magazine not just in html on their site but in various e-book platforms like Smashwords and as a print-on-demand journal.

I don't tweet, and I don't really use Facebook effectively, so my own site lingers somewhat down in the pile comparatively (though it comes up on the first page, probably because so many of my author bios point to my main site). My reading blog, Short Story Reader, however, has gotten attention in numerous places and so shows up pretty high up on the number of links Google finds. There again, it's more the work of others drawing attention to it than my own work of tweeting or Facebooking about it.

Anyway, if I were to ever start an online literary journal, I think the charts above might be a useful tool with regard to how to publicize the material in the journal--namely, make it available in lots of platforms.