The Phallic Road Trip

As a part of our blog’s administrative tools, we have access to statistics tracking visits to our site. Along with showing us the number of visitors, the page tracks where visitors come from. If, for instance, you clicked on a link to us from another web page (like one of our Facebook profiles), a referral will appear in our list. This really isn’t that interesting for us because we’re the ones who have put the links up to our page in the first place. Instead, we focus on the section labeled “Search Engine Terms.” This gives us a list of what people searched for to reach our site.

So far, these have fallen into four categories:

We have had specific ones like: “phallic road trip” (5 times), “phallicroadtrip.com” (2 times) and “phallic road” (1 time). These are most likely from people who know that they want to end up at this page. If you are searching for “phallic road” and are looking for porn something else, there are many search terms that would yield better results. The search term “west phalic” (sic) may also be along those lines, but I don’t know how.

Two of the terms relate to our blog and would come from random people: “russell branyan 465-foot home run brewer” and “road trip southern california to minneapolis” (each 1 time). We witnessed that 465-foot homer in Milwaukee and our road trip does include SoCal and Minneapolis. This is probably not the best site for information on either topic, but at least we’re in the same ballpark.

The third category gets strange. It’s the WTF? category. On June 5th, we received a visit to our site from someone searching “did jimmy buffet die on tuesday june 3,2008”. The answer is no in case you were worried. (I know I was. I don’t think I could imagine what kind of world we would have without the music of Jimmy Buffet. He single-handedly fostered my love for margaritas AND cheeseburgers. Musical genius.) Sarcasm aside, he is alive and will be performing at Madison Square Garden on Thursday. Why did Google refer this poor soul to our blog? Because Phil mentioned hearing Jimmy Buffet at the Mall of America in the post “Fargo Bound” dated June 3rd, 2008.

There is only one way to describe the last category: disturbing. Yesterday, we received a visit to our site from the search term “phallus 10 year old.” I am not making this up. Of course, our site has nothing to do with this. We weren’t even on the first… or the second… or the third… page of search results from Google. That’s right, we were on the top of the fourth (!) page with the listing shown below:

The referenced post is Justin’s on the Clean Plate Club which he joined as a “young, but husky 10 year-old boy.” This whole ordeal has left him feeling violated. Unfortunately, this post will probably move our site higher in the search results for “phallus 10 year old.” At least next time, the perverts will read this first.

UPDATE: Just received a hit from the search term “phallic food.” So add another one to the WTF? category. We like the whole phallic road trip thing, but we don’t eat that way.

This entry was posted on Monday, June 9th, 2008 at 8:57 am and is filed under Thoughts. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.