Over the past few weeks, the traffic to my AnimalRights.Net site really started going through the roof and I was at a loss to explain why. There hadn’t been any major news developments in the animal rights area, and with the war on Iraq stories about animal rights activists seem to have been down somewhat (reporters busy elsewhere). So why the higher traffic?
It turned out I had a tabloid and the Dixie Chicks to thanks. Of course the Dixie Chicks earned a lot of ink for their stand on the war in Iraq, and as part of that it came out that the Chicks had posed for one of those “I’d Rather Go Naked Than Wear Fur” ads posted by PETA. Then they chickened out and told PETA never to release it.
Anyway, this tabloid whose web site receives a lot more traffic than mine wrote a story about the controversy that included a thumbnail graphic of the ad which you could click on to see a bigger version and a link to a page on my site about PETA.
But the HTML was malformed so if you clicked on the picture, as thousands and thousands of peopel did, you got sent directly to my site rather than the site containing the larger version of the JPEG.
I wish I could get bigger sites to do that more often!