Number 32? Really?

From time to time I check on where visitors to this blog come from. Like others, I use a site counter that tells me the number of visitors each day and usually the city of origin. I can count on certain cities, such as Lubbock, Fort Worth, Fresno and of course Austin in the list every day. From time-to-time others check in from Tulare, or Merkel, or Victoria, or Vernon, British Columbia. I always wonder about those "foreign" addresses. How did those folks come this way?

Often they get here from Google searches, such as the one who clicked in from Vernon, BC after a search that included the words "earthquake victims, reflections." Or someone in Phoenix who was searching for "Becky Orick Austin" (I mentioned that she sang at our Christmas eve service). Try it. You'll see this blog in the first page of results.

The other day I saw a saw a search from an unidentified source that had "NetworkedBlogs,com/Retirement" as the search argument. I went there and found that it was a list of the top 50 blogs on retirement. Really? Top 50? And there I was as number 32.

Turns out that this is a FaceBook site. You can list your blog as part of your Facebook profile and I did that when I first got on FB, but I couldn't figure out how it was supposed to work. This list is evidently all FB-enrolled blogs with the word "retirement" as a topic. And the ranking seems to be by the number of people in FB that "follow" this blog. I have 3; me, a woman from church who promised to follow mine if I would follow hers, and a complete stranger to me.

So, there you are. The 32nd most followed blog concerning retirement listed on Facebook. I'm sort of underwhelmed.