algorithm and blues

One of the many things one can do with a website is track how many visitors one has and where they come from. I don’t mean that we can tell you were born in Connecticut (damn yankee) but we can tell that 6 people came to us from the East Valley Tribune site and 8 people came here from the AzCentral site. We can also find out which search terms people use.

One would think that if you were to enter an exact term that matched us that google would point you in our direction. Not so much. Try to google “Ladies of Perptual HOPE” and you will get three pages of “Ladies of perpetual Help” before you see any mention of us. It’s not that google has anything against us. It’s these algorithms that they use. Algorithms are little demons that the voodoo gods of the internet use for their own purposes.

There are ways to improve your chances of getting listed higher on the google page. Messing with search engine optimization is much like practicing Santería. It can be dangerous but people who live by it swear to it. We have done nothing here at H.O.P.E. H.Q. to optimize our search rankings. Maybe we should – but we have other fish to fry right now. Boy, a nice batter dipped filet with extra tarter sauce would be so yummy right now.

Sorry – back to topic.

Our friend at BrainCheese gets many more visitors than we do. She also gets many strange visitors. I smugly assumed it is because she has a potty mouth and is slightly sick and twisted. Whereas we here at H.O.P.E. are models of decorum and dignity. Then I decided to see how people found our site. Most folks that come here are people who are in some way related to our team members. That makes sense. I imagine some of our sponsors check in to see what sort of nice things we might be saying about them. The very first person to find our site via a search engine was searching for non-cal vodka mixes. Okay – we had a few vodka drink recipes in our early days, makes a degree of sense. Here are the latest four results:

"how to fake it at christmas" sent 1 total visits
"free baby hat knitting" sent 1 total visits
"pictur of lades brest" sent 1 total visits
"benifits to ladiesof water melon" sent 1 total visits

Gee thanks google! You really thought this was appropriate? The person looking for the baby hat left quickly, as did the person wondering how watermelon benefits ladies. The person looking for pictur of lades brest stayed awhile and looked at more than one page. Is it not abundantly and immediately clear that we are not a porn site?

Hopefully any of y’all reading this were not expecting a different site. If you were I’m sorry but the fault lies with the little algorithm demons. There is a Santería ritual we could do for bringing needed people to us, but it involves candles and we are not going to waste one of our Gold Canyon candles on voodoo!

(Ha! You thought we were going to miss an opportunity to shill for one of our Christmas in July vendors? Silly people!)