Blogkeeping - meta-blog me

I still occasionally indulge in the blog-related sport of link tracking. If I click on the counter at the bottom (and I think this will work for you too, if you're interested. No? Thought not.) I can choose to view the last 100 page hits by the referring page. The vast majority of them are search results and this is where it gets interesting. Two things of interest to me are trends and being number one for "obscure" searches. In the trends world, there was a time when I got a lot of hits for searches on Jive Turkey (a turkey restaurant in NYC that I mentioned in passing on Deborama's Kitchen) and Aimee Tyler, a minor soft-porn actress or model or something (I had a really hard time finding a picture clean enough to link to on a family-friendly blog.) This was because of the caption to the family reunion picture, where my daughter Aimee and my nephew Tyler just happened to be standing next to each other. These two entities must have fallen out of fashion because I hardly ever see these search terms any more. Almost from the beginning, I have had tons of hits from people who try to widen their pathetic horizons by typing the word "sex" into a Yahoo or Google search. In fact, for at least the past two years, this has accounted for about 40% of all hits and at least 50% of search result hits. My ranking in terms of where in the list Deborama falls has moved up steadily from low three figures to 88th to 30th (with Yahoo.) This result only happens if the searcher uses the directory function rather than searching the whole web. I guess commercial online sex shops don't use the directory, which is really stupid of them. If you search "the web" for sex, you get 558 million hits, but if you search the Yahoo directory, you get less than 2000. I am not sure where Deborama falls amongst the 558 million, but it is there, although obviously this list is very volatile. Now, here's an interesting trend. After sex, the highest number of search hits are for people searching for recipes, hitting Deboramas' Kitchen. And by far, at least 90%, are searching for a recipe for hash-browns. Who knew? And of course, although these anonymous searchers have no way to know this, I actually do have one of the best hash-browns recipes in the world.
On the other track, there a few interesting searches where a Deborama blog comes out at number one. For instance, I have a super-meta-links page called Deborama's Fund of Knowledge and it comes out first on a search for "fund of knowledge". I will try not to let that go to my head. In the recent statistics, there is another of those serendipitous hits; I posted a link to a story in Fried Green al-Qaedas about a veteran's hospital in the late 1970s that mentioned the phrase "POW mentality". The first hit on the search term was my post, the post I linked to was number four and the main American POW-MIA website was number five.