Having one of my periodic looks through my stats this evening and I discovered a number of things. First that my “there is no such thing as anonymous” still holds true. Despite using fronting service to hide their identity, a certain user from Kirkland spent almost 45 minutes surfing my site late last night through one of those sites that promise to keep your identity hidden. Only thing is that they don’t work too well, while the IP is masked, everything else seems to appear.
The second is that over the last few months I’ve had almost 3000 hits for a very specific search term be directed to my site via Google. Yeah, I noticed a certain search term was coming up a lot, and did not think too much of it, certainly never enough to look at the numbers in detail. I don’t get that much traffic that I would fail to notice close to 1000 additional hits a month. I figured they were a search-bot scanning the site or something similar.
I looked and they were all searching on one term (a name actually, 2+2=4 in this case) and were clearly targeted at my front page. What’s more they were all coming from two sources, a blackberry in New York and a server at a university in Seattle, both via the same search engine.
I spoke to one of those people who know these things, who helped me modify my code to stop counting those. It’s nice to have smart, geeky friends who understand code, I can put up with a little snorting at my puny efforts in order to get rid of some of this background noise on my stats. Anyway he explained to me what this was and what it achieves.
It all comes down to search term ranking. If a search is continually made linking A to B (with A being the search term, and B being the website) the search engine algorithms promotes the site up the ranking when that search term is used. So that in the future when A is searched for it will automatically link with B. Think of it as the opposite of search engine optimization and that’s about it. I’ve an idea who is doing some of it, but utterly puzzled as to why someone wants to make this link, but I’m discovering more and more all the time, so there we go.
Related articles
- Search Engine Algorithm Basics (seomoz.org)
- Networking online to boost your website’s SEO (marketing.yell.com)
- Search engine optimization Tips In which Drive More Visitors For Your Site (ronmedlin.com)
