Want 10 million uniques/day? Put a link on Google's homepage

By announcing their most popular blogposts of the year, Google also showed the power of their homepage.

Here's the info from Google's (GOOG) 2010 wrapup:

The top posts this year run the gamut from policy changes to product arrivals:

1. A different kind of company name - 10,604,183 unique pageviews, more than 30 percent of the year's total. Our April Fools' Day post about changing our company name to "Topeka" had a crazy-high number of pageviews, in large part because there was a link to our humble blog on Google's homepage that day. That's a lot of eyes!
2. A new approach to China - 924,335. We post about our new approach to business in China; we will no longer censor search results on Google.cn.
3. Introducing Google Chrome OS - 653,803. This post introducing our open source operating system was published in July 2009 (and was the top post of 2009), but continued to draw readers this year. (This month, we launched a pilot program for Chrome OS notebooks.)

What's interesting is that the China post would likely carry much more traffic on its own, but since Google carried the post on the homepage, the April Fool's post got 10 million more views.  That's a pretty huge amount of traffic at Google's disposal.

Google is pretty stingy with its homepage though it does us it on occasion to advertise the Chrome Browser or Nexus phones occasionally and not prominently.