Scratching an imaginary itch, the blogger tried to make sense of the data displayed on screen. The last five weeks had seen traffic to their main website more than double, thanks in part to the SEO work they had put into each of the thousand-plus blog articles that had been written since college. Focusing on a very narrow niche subject, the amateur writer had decided to use their real name in an attempt to bring more credibility to their name, while making legitimate business contacts at the same time.

Interestingly enough, though, the people coming to the site were coming through search engines with really odd requests. Words that had very little to do with the subject on hand, aside from being semi-related synonyms to keywords selected were commonly seen, with bounce rates of almost 100%. It seemed that only 15% of all visitors from the big search engines were actually looking for the information found on the blog, while the majority of people were finding the site while looking for something completely off topic.

“How the heck does this happen?” Being the only person in the room, nobody had an answer for the blogger, but it did give them something to think about for the next phase of the SEO project.

Taking a page from mainstream media, according to a statistic pulled from the farthest reaches of “where the sun don’t shine,” over 90% of all bloggers use some sort of pseudonym in order to keep some semblance of separation between the online and offline realms. This level of ubiquitous anonymity provides most people the freedom to say what they want about whoever they want, as well as the opportunity to eliminate an online persona at a moments notice should a situation get out of hand. However, despite the freedoms a person may have while writing under an assumed name, there are some advantages to using your real name online.

That said, what does a person do when they notice that a large percentage of their visitors are coming through search engines like Google and Yahoo! with really weird queries? What can we do when there are a few keywords that put us on the first page of an unfavorable query? Or, perhaps more interestingly, what can we glean from the visitors that come to our sites using queries that would get most normal people locked up?

Search Engine Psychology

Over the last two years I have had the luxury of working with over 50 bloggers to help them build their sites from the ground up. I’m not a professional blogger by any stretch of the imagination, but I do have the basic skills required to set somebody up with a simple WordPress site and a number of themes that might catch their eye. One aspect of my services involves basic SEO training and, after monitoring close to 80 websites, I’ve come to the realization that bounce rates are incredibly high not because of phenomenally poor SEO, but due to something far more sinister: Google’s overuse of synonyms, and Yahoo’s inability to tell the difference between a good search result and a hole in the ground.

More than this, though, is the analysis of the search strings that are most commonly seen for each site. It makes me want to peek into the lives of some of the people searching for information, if only for half an hour or so, just to see if I’m imagining too many strange things. Here are a few of the actual search strings that I’ve seen for people coming to this site in the last 30 days, in order of frequency:

  1. Jason japan
  2. Drought Africa G77
  3. japan sucks
  4. jason irwin
  5. Japan Canada work
  6. Find work Japan
  7. Porno japan
  8. Young boy prostitute japan
  9. Jason pedophile
  10. Space elevator japan

It seems that I have the “Japan” keyword nailed pretty good, as well as my first name. Heck, I’ve even started seeing some pretty good results when checking for my ranking using my full name; Jason Irwin. But what the hell is up with points seven through nine? People are actually coming to this site by looking for these things in Google and Yahoo!? But this isn’t the scariest one I’ve seen recently. Not by a long shot. Earlier today I was checking my FireStats and this is what I was met with:

“I want to watch child porno”

What the hell is this? I can understand that some search engines might be perfectly content with my post a few months back talking about some ways that we might combat child pornography online but how does this translate into people being foolish enough to actually type something so damning into a search engine?

Understanding the Mind of a Fool, or Over-Analyzing the Data?

Just for giggles, I decided to check out the IP of the person that wanted to watch this highly flammable form of rape and was shocked to discover that the fool was from the United States. From the good ol’ Christian state of Texas, no less. I wonder why this person isn’t worried that the FBI or some other federal organization might be monitoring activity like this. Heck, considering how stupid some of the dolts were in NBC’s “To Catch A Predator” series, you’d think that the average idiot that gets off on watching kids subjected to something worse than water-boarding would have wisened up just a little bit to prevent getting caught with their pants down.

Clearly I was mistaken.

But now I’m left wondering just why someone would be so daft as to actually type this in to a web browser. Considering the amount of press the worldwide criminal investigations of this matter seems to garner, you’d think that people would know that they need to use the less traversed realms of the interweb in order to meet their needs. UseNET, closed IRC channels, and obscure FTPs with very limited access would be a few of the places that might still carry such taboo materials. Those who are familiar with Torrents might have some secret trackers at their disposal, but somehow I doubt that people would want to connect and risk having their IP broadcasted to any number of seeds that turn out to be police agencies engaging in a necessary, albeit potentially illegal, form of entrapment.

All this said, perhaps the data is nothing more than part of a police investigation for illegal activities. Who’s to say that the person using Yahoo! to search for potentially horrific depictions of children in all manners of inescapable predicaments wasn’t a law-enforcer who is working night and day to bring the lowest scum of the earth into the waiting arms of a federal prison where countless hardened criminals can subject the “fresh meat” to the same situation as they had once enjoyed viewing?
Regardless of the intent of these visits, one thing is for certain: people who have blogs that cover a multitude of topics and discussions will likely see lots of strange search terms that have brought visitors from all over the world. There have been an incredible number of visitors coming to this site looking for some kind of pornography, and there are other sites under my domains that have seen visitors come for everything from pictures of shaved monkeys, to dancing emoticons. How they manage to arrive, I’ll probably never know, but I’d love to find some ways to capitalize on it.

Have you noticed any strange patterns with search terms for your sites? Is this the result of search engines being too smart, or is it a failure in SEO? I’d love to hear your thoughts on the matter.