I, like most bloggers, am interested in who links here. Sometimes I get a bump in hits, and I know PZ or some other big blog has linked in.
Of course, knowing what people typed into Google is a good bit of knowledge to have, too. It’s interesting to know what keywords people used to find the site. Some people value that knowledge highly, since a listing on Google’s search engine result page (or SERP) near the top of that first page means it’s more likely someone will come to your site (think about it: how many times have you scrounged ten pages deep into Google to find what you needed?).
So what words have surfers used lately to find Bad Astronomy via Google?
- "shuttle ignition video": Well, this doesn’t surprise me too much, since I wrote about cool videos from the recent Shuttle launch.
- "ann coulter + evolution": I guess this didn’t surprise me either, since I blogged about her deranged, delusional spewings recently as well. I was surprised to be on Google’s first page of results though. Cool.
- But what to make of "lyrics to Monkeys in Outer Space"? I suppose it must be due to this entry. I guess it should bug me that something so silly, whimsical, and ultimately useless gets people here, but what the heck.
Now that the blog is the main page of the site, I’ll see other weird reasons for people to come here besides looking for "moon hoax" or "face on mars"… hey, wait. Those are weird too! Sigh. What a life.
July 17th, 2006 at 1:09 pm
Now, with that post, you will no doubt get a few people looking for State Earnings Related Pensions: http://www.thepensionservice.gov.uk/serps/
And they will be disappointed… or maybe not!
July 17th, 2006 at 1:10 pm
You fell from the first page to the third on the Ann Coulter search. However, is still the second hit when I search for my own name plus the word “sex”.
July 17th, 2006 at 1:11 pm
Oops. My previous post was intended to read as follows:
You fell from the first page to the third on the Ann Coulter search. However, an old entry of yours is still the second hit when I search for my own name plus the word “sex”.
All your commenters will rejoice, Professor BA, when that “Preview” button arrives. . . (-:
July 17th, 2006 at 1:14 pm
oh cheer up phil. You know if someone looks for the moon hoax and lands here, that a small thing has gone right in the world.
be proud!
July 17th, 2006 at 3:44 pm
This is my first comment although I read your blog for about 6 months or so. I for one landed here looking for the moon hoax after I found a “documentary” about it. Well you ought to be proud, after I read your debunking my (very few) doubts vanished, and well, I’m still here!
July 17th, 2006 at 3:57 pm
There’s a game I like to play called “Stump Google”. To play, you must enter a search with the following parameters:
+a_fruit +a_power_tool +sex
The + is required.
So: +pineapple +chainsaw +sex (this one remarkably returns 28,200 hits)
The winner is the one with the lowest hits, kind of like golf. It’s been startlingly hard to get 0, although I’ve managed it once or twice.
More to the topic at hand,
+astronomy +magnetar +sex
returns 715 hits. Whoda thunk that magnetar research was so naughty.
July 17th, 2006 at 4:25 pm
Evolving Squid,
I bet some of the hits of the magnatars are due to objects in the constellation Sextantis which is shortened to “Sex” when referring to a variable star. For instance, +astronomy+cataclysmic variables+sex brings up 18,900 hits. Of course I knew that there were a few cataclysmic variables in the constellation Sextantis.
July 17th, 2006 at 5:29 pm
hehe Evolving Squid that is a great game for a bored surfer:).
BTW Phil I like this new layout. The old one (well, the old new one:P) felt a bit weird to me, especially the font.
July 18th, 2006 at 4:34 am
Can someone tell me how to find out which Google search keywords bring people to one’s website?
J. D.
July 18th, 2006 at 6:47 am
Can someone tell me how to find out which Google search keywords bring people to one’s website?
The answer to that question depends wholly on how your website is run. On my web site ( http://darincowan.typepad.com ), and probably any “hosted” web site - particularly hosted blogs - I can log in to the admin interface and get a “stats” page that shows me “referrer” links. Those links are often google (or other search engine) search hits, so if I click on them it brings me to the exact search page that visitor used to get to my site. So for this site, BA can probably log in to a stats page and get the same kind of info. Hence, if you google this page, you should always use: +”Bad Astronomy” +Plait pineappleor other weird terms to add humour to his otherwise uninteresting administrative duties
If you are running the web site yourself on, say, a Linux box, you’d have to get the referrer information yourself. You can tease it out of logs, etc. if you set the parameters correctly on the web server.
I have no idea how you’d do it if you run IIS. I assume that, like most Microsoft products, extracting useful log information involves a dark ceremony involving naked people, woad, lots of candles, a chicken and a black dagger
July 18th, 2006 at 6:53 am
Oh, on the naughty magnetar search, only 2 of the top 10 hits deal with SW Sex (Sextanis). The rest actually have clinical or research discussions about sex somewhere on the page.
July 18th, 2006 at 7:50 am
Ah, good ole SW Sex. My thesis advisor had to pick that one as the namesake for a class of cataclysmic variables. I then gave him grief when he vetoed my original title of my thesis. He didn’t like “SW Sextanis Stars, Superhumps, and other things that go bump in the night”. I told him I wasn’t the one who chose SW Sex instead of DW Ursa Majoris (DW UMa) as the namesake for the class of stars. And I wasn’t the one who coined the term “superhumps” either (it describes the shape of how the light intensity varies over time for certain cataclysmic variables).