I installed the Popularity Contest plug-in on Monday. It uses a bunch of factors including number of page views, number of comments, number of viewings on home/category/archive pages, number of pingbacks, etc. to determine the most popular posts on the site. At first it tracked the “Most Commented” list fairly closely, because comments, pingbacks, and trackbacks are the most highly-weighted factors. Then all the posts in the Buffy/Angel category started taking over.

Fallen Angel artwork by J.K. WoodwardIt turns out that a lot of people do image searches for things like “dark angels” or “fallen angel”—and right now, the #1 hit on Google for “dark angels” is the thumbnail I posted of the Fallen Angel #1 cover, presumably because I posted about both Angel and Fallen Angel in a post called “Dark Angels”. And because the Buffy/Angel category is full of more comments about Angel and Dark Horse, Google chose that as the page to use instead of the individual post. The default settings give a lot of weight to category views, so everything on that page has shot up to the top.

Speaking of Fallen Angel, I noticed in this week’s shipping list that the latest issue is listed as #2 of 5. This was the first I remembered it being a miniseries, but not to worry—it’s slated to continue.

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