Getting Pinged

In the past few days the number of hits on my blog has increased quite a bit.  I would love to believe that it is because I am such a great writer full of interesting stuff but I have concluded that this is not true (alas.)  There are a number of services that "ping" your web site to generate traffic.  The concept is that the more "hits" you get the higher the search engines will place you in the results.  This is important since most people rarely go past the first page of the search results.  Of course this is old news.  The search engines are aware of the concept and have been written to take it into account when providing rankings.  One way to try and beat the AI in the search engines is to hit the original site and then link out to other sites.  The idea of course is that this looks more like real human behavior. Blogger provides analytic capabilities including a back trace that tells you where your traffic is coming from.  Almost all of the extra hits are from the same web site.  The reason that I do not name it is twofold:  first, I think it is a great site, and second, I don't know that it is the primary site or just further down the tree.  I would not want to smear it when it does not deserve it.