Big Day, Thanks to Yahoo!

Today has been going great here at P-Squared. When I awoke this morning, the traffic on the blog was about normal, if not even a tad lower than sometimes. My day totally changed when I got to work just 30 minutes later and that initial number had increased over 3,000%.

I wondered what was going on, so I checked where people were coming from, and it was Yahoo! search engine traffic, every few seconds… to the same article using the exact same search string! Wondering what was going on, I thought maybe someone was trying a Denial of Service attack and spamming the same search to bring down the server. I checked where the hits were originating, but they were coming from all over the world.

Since they were all directed toward the article on Kevin Richardson, Lion Whisperer from June, I wondered if he went and pulled a Steve Irwin and got himself killed being with the animals he’s so nuts about. Since they were all coming from Yahoo!, I went there to see if there was a headline about his death or something.

This is what I saw:

Looking at the full-size screenshot, you’ll see that I marked a search link. What that did was bring up a search using Yahoo! and a pre-filled search that brought up my article up as the #3 link on the page.

So… my day is going great. The numbers are piling up, and hopefully some people are staying to see what other great content I have here. It’s not like the related links and other popular stories are hard to find.

That was fun while it lasted. It looks like as of 9:50am the feature was taken off the front page and is no longer easy to find. I ended up with over 80x more hits than when I left for work.

What was your biggest boost for your blog? A big link from a popular blog/site? A news story? Hitting the jackpot with a popular topic of the day that brought up your blog?