"Hits"
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1.3 min/day Avg. Time on Site
285 Sites Linking In
And last year, we enjoyed 758,893 total page hits.
Not long ago I wrote letters --- old-fashioned print-on-paper letters --- to Alexa and Quantcast. I complained about their figures, wondered from which idiot brain-space of the internet they came from. I even called and managed to get through to Alexa. I pointed out that we get many more "viewers" than they are showing.
Their representative who sounded to be no more than fifteen years old responded that we would need to conform to their system which requires that we code each of our existing pages for a link directly to them. This would demonstrate something called "Business Activity Data." This exotic notation would have to be placed by someone --- presumably me --- on every one of our online pages.
Since we have 16,915 different pages up there in hyperspace --- mostly book reviews stretching back to 1994 --- that would mean that I would have to figure out how to get their wretched doodles in place to conform to their wretched rules. I pointed out that we are book people, not computer people, but the young man was bored, obviously unmoved, eager to get back to his computer space station or whatever they call it.
Google, by the way, seems to confirm our take on hits. Our review of E. L. Doctorow's novel, Homer and Langley, turned up for several months within their top twenty listings. Our take on Crow Planet, another new title, appeared at #6.
And our reviews tend to persist. An item we put on-line almost fifteen years ago --- our thoughts on Alone: The Classic Polar Adventure by Admiral Richard E. Byrd --- is still among the first fifty entries of that celebrated writer (and hapless adventurer) on Google.
The Review of Arts, Literature,
Philosophy, and the Humanities
San Diego CA 92176
poo@cts.com
www.ralphmag.org