January 29, 2006

Seven of Nine and The Click Five

Site referrals can often deliver good insight into what a visitor is looking for, and how they happened to stumble upon your place in the World Wide Web. But they can often be confusing rather than helpful, as well - especially when a visitor is looking for something that either was never mentioned on your site, or through some odd coincidence, has seen a rise through the search engines - presenting a false positive.

The latter has certainly been the case with louisgray.com. As you already know, this last year, I started authoring a weekly comic strip for Athletics Nation, called "The ANtics", highlighting the A's players, and trying to deliver a new form of amusement, while leveraging some fantastic software. After amassing about ten or so of these episodes, I created a dedicated page on the site as a comics archive, and listed them out from one through ten and beyond. But my simple writing out of these numbers has done wonders for pushing louisgray.com forward in Google's image hierarchy - for terms that have nothing to do with the site.

For example - "Seven of Nine", from Star Trek: Voyager... there is an immense following on the Web of folks looking for her picture (I don't even want to know why) from around the world. My site statistics from SiteMeter show visitors looking for seven of nine from The Netherlands, Virginia and Seattle, Washington, just for starters. I'm sure they're very disappointed to see I am not a Trekkie - or ever will be. Another example is the band "The Click Five". The combination of the word five, and a simple "Click Here" message has similarly promoted the ANtics comics through Google's image directory - and I have NO IDEA what those guys play, so again, the wrong place - but again, I have visitors from Denmark, Baltimore, Maryland, and The Netherlands (again), looking for news on the band.

You can see the offending Google image results here: (Seven Of Nine) and (The Click Five). Very amusing.