Oh dear. This one is going to haunt me for years.
Google recently introduced some neat free stats for webmasters, and being the eager webmaster I am, I decided to sign up and enable myself.
What I found is that while many of my top search terms are reasonable (“quicksilver os x”, “play asia”, “ny1”), my #5 Top Search Query and my #1 and #2 Top Search Query Clicks are, in the words of Rob Huebel, “un-savory”. And the problem is, I know why – at least partially.
This one is potentially not safe for work. You’re going to have to click through for the rest of the story.
That magic search query is *my cock*. No, I’m not joking:
And not only is it my top clickthrough – I’m #1 for that search query. This means that if you google for “my cock”, above all the porno sites and disgustingness, you get the bright shining beacon of good that is vjarmy.com. Hell, if you’re feeling lucky for “my cock”, you end up here too.
Before I go off the deep end with the lengthy dick jokes, I should explain:
Back in March of 2004, a certain well-known blogger/programmer made a long post about how great RSS was in comparison to Atom as a syndication format. These sorts of arguments bore 99.9% of the populace, but I always found them interesting. This one threw me, though; the title of the post was “RSS is raging”.
Being a touch immature (who isn’t?), when I hear the word “raging”, I think of immature things. So on a whim, I ripped the text of the post, replaced all instances of “RSS” with “my cock”, and read it. It was hilarious, but not something I wanted to post to my blog. I dumped it to a text file, linked to it in a very current-tech friendly IRC channel, one where the person in question is a frequently point of conversation.
That was it. That was the end of my paying attention to it or doing anything with it. Didn’t link to it from my blog, didn’t mention that I had done this – just buried the file. I got 4 links, according to Technorati; Google has 3, although one was inside a MetaFilter thread. Still – nothing really substantial, right?
But apparently not. I guess the repetition in the text file, combined with the few links I’ve gotten, make for a top search term. And it’s frustrating, because I’d rather be found based on the useful things I’ve written than the goofy one-off jokes I do.
For now, Google has made this my cross to bear. And if some day, I fall off the top of the rankings, or hopefully find a less offensive search term to top the charts at, I’ll always have this post to remember this “event” by.