With almost 336,000 page views, October 2001 was just shy of being the busiest month ever. Of course the busiest site remains Overpopulation.Com which rang up in excess of 102,000 page views. Not bad for something that started as a brief Usenet post back in 1996.
October’s page view total probably would have been much higher except for an oddity with the way Google indexes pages. If you look at my chart breaking down page views by site, you’ll see that visits to AnimalRights.Net actually declined significantly in October. The main reason for that decline was that the site wasn’t listed at all in Google for much of October (normally, it is in the top 5 sites if you search on “animal rights.”)
This seems to have something to do with the way Google indexes sites — they seem to de-list a site temporarily while they are re-crawling it, and something apparently happened that delisted the site for much of October. I sent an e-mail to the Google folks explaining my predicament and wondering if there was anything I was doing on my end that was causing that behavior. I never heard back from them, but the problem seems to have been fixed — at least for now.