I Feel All Googley

Referrers

On my hits & referrers page I get a list of where many of the folks visiting the site zoomed in from. Some are coming in from search engines like Google, and if I click on the link provided it takes me to the page on Google (or whatever) that they were on, so I can see the search terms they typed in to the engine. I also see where my page is in the the search engine’s ranks.

Often I’m intrigued by what I find.

Some tidbits:

  • The initial post on the passing of Sr. Lucia turns up at the top of the list if you type in "Sr. Lucia" on Google.
  • The post Double Crime Recap!!! is right at the top if you type in "What happened to Sharonna on Monk" on Google.
  • The post The Liger Sleeps Tonight? gets a surprising number of search engine hits. I’m often intrigued by what people type in to get it. Some are very blunt ("liger picture"), others suspicious ("liger hoax"), and some are child-like ("picture of the liger"–as if there were only one).

At least these are the way things are right now. I’m sure over time other pages will come to prominence on these issues, given the way Google technology works.

Sometimes it isn’t what is in the post itself that is driving the search engine’s rank. Sometimes it’s what’s in the comments section, so kudos to all y’all for adding value to the site via your comments!

Author: Jimmy Akin

Jimmy was born in Texas, grew up nominally Protestant, but at age 20 experienced a profound conversion to Christ. Planning on becoming a Protestant seminary professor, he started an intensive study of the Bible. But the more he immersed himself in Scripture the more he found to support the Catholic faith, and in 1992 he entered the Catholic Church. His conversion story, "A Triumph and a Tragedy," is published in Surprised by Truth. Besides being an author, Jimmy is the Senior Apologist at Catholic Answers, a contributing editor to Catholic Answers Magazine, and a weekly guest on "Catholic Answers Live."

2 thoughts on “I Feel All Googley”

  1. I used to have full text monthly archives like you do and I would get the strangest search engine query referrers. One word in a search phrase would be on one entry while the second word would be on a completely different entry. Due to the aggregation of the entries into monthly archives, it would register as a google hit. Argh!
    Unlike you, I could care less about people finding my web site via a search engine so I took steps to reduce the indexing of my pages. I realize it’s kind of the exception to weblogging. 🙂 Now the referrer terms are much less.

  2. Funny, I searched ligers recently. Not sure why, probably to show to my son. Don’t remember your blog showing up, and I’d probably have noticed the familiar name if it did.
    I probably just entered “liger.”

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