Search Engine Keywords notoriously provide endless amusement to anyone who runs a website. These are the words people have entered into search engines which lead them to your site. I’ve had my fair share of amusing, peculiar and utterly befuddling keywords, with favourites including ‘“stuart sharpe” jesus’, ‘glasses give me headache’, ‘sharpes nails’ and ‘“peter petrelli’s face”’. This site is but young, though – others have had far more fun
My curiosity was aroused however, when I noticed that someone recently arrived on this site by searching on Yahoo! for ‘top hat & tails quarantine kennel & cattery’.
I verified this quite easily: it still happens now1 – the fourth result on Yahoo! search for that term is a page on this site with the title ‘[cref 1297 The Worst Scam on Earth]’. It’s not hard to imaging that this could have genuine business consequences for the company – okay, even a cursory read of the post in question would allay any fears that the kennel in question has been involved in any form of confidence trick, but associations form quickly and irrationally, and that slight black mark against a company’s name could theoretically lose them business. The power of search engines is widely recognised in this regard, and the practice of increasing your own site’s ‘page ranking’ – or where it appears on search engines for specific phrases – has developed into a booming industry in its own right.
The reason for the search result turned out to be a list of kennels left in the comments. Now, just quickly I’d like to make sure it’s clear that there’s nothing wrong with writing whatever you like in the comments on this blog – I’m grateful for every comment and I’m delighted that anyone has the inclination to read my ramblings, let alone comment on them. What’s more, I don’t expect anyone to watch what they say for fear of how it looks externally – it’s my responsibility, as the blogger and administrator, to look after the content of this site. Indeed that is exactly what I have done, the list of businesses has been removed and I’ve left a note of explanation in its place. What I’m getting at is how random and unpredictable these connections and associations can be. How impossible it is to recognise in advance how information will be digested, distributed and interpreted by the internet at large.
And here we find our philosophical truth: that an innocuous comment with benign intentions can have completely unintended consequences further down the line. That the internet exists in a state of true chaos.
Near enough every page on the internet is indexed by search engines and often retained in a searchable cache. Even websites which have disappeared from the internet can live on with technologies like the Internet Archive’s ‘Way-Back Machine‘. As Maximus Decimus Meridius once said, what we do in life echoes in eternity.
For those of us who run websites, I have discovered that it is our responsibility to make sure that the trail we leave behind doesn’t inadvertently harm other people’s lives or businesses.
And that I find humbling.
- at time of writing, of course. If you are reading this after the date on which it was published, results may, quite literally, vary. [↩]