Dr. Phil, how could you? There are a few search term charts that I hold sacred, “prom dresses” and “diets” are my top two, in fact, I devoted a whole chapter of Click to “diet” searches and our New Year’s resolutions. So this year as I prepared to report for a sixth straight year that January 1st was the peak for visits to online dieting sites, I was shocked to see that New Year’s day was surpassed by the 5th of January!
I may not agree with everything the good doctor (Ph.D, not MD) says or does around his hit talk show, but I can tell you this; Dr. Phil is a diet promotion machine. Here’s a brief postmortem on the January 1st diet spike.
This year, of the top 10 searches containing “diet” the number one search was “17 day diet” (variations on the term were also #6 and #9) followed by “hcg diet” and “atkins diet.” Last year’s #1 diet search “Jesus diet” (really I’m not making this up) didn’t make the top 100.
Here’s a chart on traffic to the top three searched diets:

Each of those massive spikes in visits to www.the17daydiet.com correspond to the diet being featured on the show. Interestingly, as far as the #1 place that searchers visited after typing “17 day diet” into a search engine, they didn’t go to the diet’s official site, or even Dr. Phil’s site they went to Diets in Review.com (31.9%).
So diet book publishers take note, the new Oprah of weight loss book promotion is none other than her prodigy, Phil McGraw.
Dr. Phil, I’ll let this one slide, but so help me, if you start promoting prom dresses on your show…