Google seems to be a popular blogging topic. Mostly because Google seems to be quite broken right now, but also there are always people around amused at the search terms people use to find their blog or other strange things about Google.
Robin of Bumblebee Blog had a good idea. She suggested her readers post some of the the search terms people use to find their blogs, then she would then make a post linking to them after December 5th, so we could all compare. Here’s my contribution. I’ve been meaning to post about this anyway.
Of course people find us for the ‘right’ reasons, by searching on topics relating to this blog, but I’m going to give some examples here of some unexpected things.
The first thing to realize is Google has really changed a lot over the last few years, and search terms people were finding us with before are not the same as now, with one exception. Before and now, the single most common term people use to find this blog is ‘weed burner’. I made a post about weed burners very early on, and I seem to have become the main Internet information resource for weed burners.
As a result of using the word ‘weed’ in a popular post, and posting a little later about cannabis, we also have no end of people who find us wanting information on this:
pics of weed
weed
cheap weed
…
I also made a post about my 325 year old wooden house foundation needing to be repaired, and a lot of people started finding us looking for information on foundations:
Why is my house sinking?
sinking house foundation
How do I know if my foundation is bad?
What does a bad foundation look like?
For a long time, people were finding us searching on information about carrots:
Can you grow carrots in a bottle?
What do carrots look like when they are underground?
What types of carrots are there?
history of carrots
pictures of carrots
how do I grow carrots
To be clear, I’ve never particularly posted much here about carrots.
For a while a number of people were finding us searching for missing bees and Colony Collapse Disorder. The popularity of the topic led me to write a number of followup articles afterwards.
A number of people have found us recently looking for pictures of different kinds of garlic. This was part of the reason for posting the pictures recently, because there aren’t many pictures of garlic on the Internet.
By far in a way the biggest ‘Google event’ happened when Steph made this post on Sierra Nevada Pale Ale.
For those of you not familiar with this beer, in recent years it’s probably become the most popular ‘alternative’ beer in the US, and it’s particularly popular among students. When Steph and I were students in Chico, California, where the brewery is located, we went on a tour of the brewery while it was still in a garage. A few days ago we bought our first bottle in Amsterdam! It still tastes the same after all these years. At 15 euros (about US$21) for six bottles it’s not going to become our daily beer again anytime soon, but it was still a nice treat.
Anyway, after Steph made this post people started ‘borrowing’ the picture by linking to it within blog posts, forums, myspace pages and so on. It’s all over the Internet now, and a search on Google images shows it’s now the most popular image above even those released by the brewery itself! The picture itself is probably the single largest source of Internet traffic for our domain, I think more than everything else combined.
Like I said, Google is broken now, but until recently it was including all of these links in our page rankings. I like to think I’m popular for other reasons, but surely this has had the greatest impact on our Google rankings!
