It’s been a crazy couple of weeks here at the Undiscovered Author, traffic-wise. They’ve been my busiest weeks yet! Some 370 hits last week, and almost as many this week already.
But, the funny thing is, although I’ve had some fairly popular posts these past few weeks (especially “What’s Hot, What’s Cool“, and my essay on Steampunk-inspired Societies, as well as my sci-fi flash, “Kathryn’s Child“) – but it hasn’t been the cool new things I’ve been talking about that have really driven my site stats up.
It’s been this. In the past week alone, that page has gotten over 130 hits. What’s driven that traffic has been a single phrase: “Settlers of Catan”. I’ve gotten 102 hits from that search phrase in the past 7 days, and more from related search phrases (like “Settlers”, “Catan Board Game”, and “Settlers of Catan 3D”)
Frankly… I’m not sure why this is happening. For one thing, my blog doesn’t appear anywhere in the Google search for that phrase for at least the first fifteen pages (I gave up looking for my blog after that), nor in the Bing search for at least ten (again, I gave up) [Note: I realize I may have actually increased my search ranking for these terms by posting this page, but hey, what’re you gonna do?). Whoever these people are driving this traffic, they have to be desperate for some news on the game. (Note, if you’re desperate for news on Settlers, I advise you check the official News page, here, which is easily in the first few hits for those sorts of search terms.)
Anyway, I’m just amused by this. And a little sad that there’s clearly this hunger out there on the internet for something about Settlers of Catan, and here all I can do is say “yeah, I like the game. My Dear Wife and I probably play it at least once a month. It kicks the trash out of Monopoly.”
(Footnote: For those who aren’t familiar with the game, the title of today’s post is an in-joke that refers back to the game: specifically a sneaky way to snatch victory in the game suddenly, even if you’re behind.)
The Undiscovered Author 