The Harry Potter post I made when I finished reading the Half Blood Prince has been way more successful than I had imagined it would be. In fact, I didn’t even consider it would be different from any other normal post I make – it was written simply because I enjoy the books. However, the post ended up getting ranked 2nd on Google for Harry Potter RAB (it’s not any more), RAB being one of the big mysteries of the sixth book, and the hits to my site came flooding in. Currently, I have just under 140 comments and I expect that number to grow.
It has all died down now but at one point, I did panic about the amount of traffic I was getting, so I quickly installed a page caching plugin that reduces server workload.
But how did this happen? My suspicion is that it’s related to the layout of my site. When designing Binary Moon, I decided to place the content of the site at the top of the page code. This approach is more common among standards-based designs. By using web standards to separate style from content and keeping visual code in a separate file, we can keep overall page size small and bring readable content to the forefront of the code – something search engines seem to favor.
As seen in the screen grab on the right, search engine queries people have used to find my site are heavily biased towards Harry Potter, although The Hoff managed to hang in there.
Normally when reading Harry Potter books, I spend a few days contemplating what might happen next and what all those secrets mean. Since my last Harry Potter post was so popular and generated differing views, I’m considering delving deeper into these theories and writing more about Potter and his friends. Don’t worry though, I’ll still be posting the usual boring nonsense as well 😀
Update: Wow – now this post is on the 1st page of Google searches for Harry Potter RAB – I wonder where the new Harry Potter RAB conspiracy theories will end up? 😀
Let me know what you think on Mastodon, or BlueSky (or Twitter X if you must).
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