The jury is back – and the final numbers in. The Let’s make New Zealand the percent post attracted an amazing amount of readership (for this blog). It got picked up …somewhere… and traffic went nuts, and then in early November traffic abruptly halted.
All up it received 355000 views, with just 6660 of them from this site and the vast majority syndicated. I have to admit I’m still at a loss as to where exactly they were syndicated to. If anyone can help on that score then please do tell.
Lance Wiggs 
Did your site have any trouble handling the load?
LikeLike
Re the syndication, I wonder if a chunk of it was from G+.
Do a search for a string from your post on Google and you’ll see a number of G+ shares reflected in the results (e.g., “Tea Party, and he and his brother hold strong Libertarian views. Some of those views I regard as part of a fair”).
The timing is about right, since open access to G+ kicked in near the end of Sept. And G+ appears to display shared RSS content within the share block itself, so it is likely any G+ users seeing the share are triggering RSS/syndicated views in WordPress.
LikeLike
About the same time, I had a real spike in my views. WordPress did something, that they then stopped, that made everyone suddenly seem much more popular than they’d been for a while.
LikeLike
Mauricio Freitas shared it via FriendFeed. I’ve found on my blogs that FriendFeed polls the RSS each time it refreshes so it can suddenly look like thousands of people are reading it on FriendFeed when in fact it’s only a couple of re-shares.
The post was also re-posted verbatim (sometimes inside a frame) which would poll your wordpress at a number of blogs like royaqadvertising.blogspot.com, amygeek.com, darinrmcclure.wordpress.com and darinrmcclure.soup.io
But my money is on the Google+ reshares. Ben is right, G+ is still settling and I’m not sure how your analytics would treat it.
LikeLike
That feels right.
LikeLike