Blog Advice on Understanding Search Engines

Now censored because AdSense says that you are not allowed to look at boobs.

Yesterday, I was reading a post by Rufus Opus where he revealed that one of the search terms driving traffic to his Head For the Red blog is "bikes with high handlebars." Ahh, the mysteries of Google and its fellow search engines.

In an ideal world, if you needed to find something on the world wide web, you would ask a real person who keeps up with the webpages for your inquiry. Unfortunately, we do not live in ideal world.

For one thing, there are way too many webpages out there, and more are being added everyday. Two, we know the type of stuff that most people google for. And we just don't want to get involved in those types of web searches.

Salma Hayek--now censored for AdSense...because you might think of sex.

(By the way, my use of "google" as a verb is wrong. Google is a trademarked business name. The proper term for "googling" is "searching." This is much like Xerox being a trademarked business name; it is "photocopying", not "xeroxing.")

Or maybe we do want to get involved in such searches. After all, if you are reading this series, you are probably interested in getting more traffic to your blog. In which case, a picture of boobs can't hurt, can it?

Can't Google for boobs on AdSense supported webpages.

Am I above trying to corner the market for people who are searching for "Golden Dawn boobs"? No.

In fact, "Golden Dawn boobs" looks like a good "long tail" candidate.

(And the market for "Star Trek Golden Dawn" has already been cornered---more or less. Don't believe me---google it. I wonder how much traffic David Griffin gets with that search term. What? You haven't wondered this? Anyway, back to search engines.)

It is the strange way that search engines work, and the way that people search for stuff on the internet, that makes long tail terms valuable. But that is a post for another day.

So what is the best way to understand search engines? After all, due to the secrecy that surrounds the programs that drive them, one can only guess what makes them tick. (It is amazing that businesses are better at keeping secrets than secret societies are.) And given the three or four hundreds factors that they track, even if their inwards were not shrouded in secrecy, it would still be a muddle.

To make things simple, think of a search engine as a spider demon who is pretending to be a human being, who is an expert in whatever terms that you punched into the query form.

Of course, this makes things simple for us---after all, we can write for human beings, including those occultists who just happen to like bikes with tall handlebars, and trust that if we are ideal according to a complicated mathmatical formula that the search engine will send traffic in our direction.

The trick is figuring who we are writing for...which is probably what I will discuss next Thursday.

In the meantime, enjoy a picture of Bart Simpson commenting on the evils of Google.

In other words, don't email people about boobs because someday Google will tell the world.

AdSense says that you are not allowed to see boobs.

[Updated August 19, 2016 because...AdSense says that there was sexual content on this page because...I used the word "boobs" and had two meme pictures that had women who had boobs...and this was wrong because....boobs equal sex even when they are covered with bras. I am guessing some web-spider decided this because no one who actually looked at the actual post would actually think that this was sexual content. Heaven knows what the web-spiders must think of my posts warning people about sex offenders and why sex magic is a bad thing when it comes to running an esoteric tradition. But in all fairness to the web-spiders, it might not have been them---it could have been one of the Golden Dawn boobs reporting me (top of my boob list is Robert Zink and David Griffin--which I would post a picture of, but hey, they are boobs! and AdSense says that you are not allowed to see pictures of them...which is probably a good thing because people have been known to go bad when they see a picture of one of them.]