Long Tail Time Bombs

Long Tail Time Bombs

I knew I would have to explain this one today. If you noticed, I have a popular posts widget in the top right corner of this blog. This is based on Google Analytics stats. Well, today you may have noticed that one of those posts was the one about Rhianna being at the Smile Jamaica-Africa unite concert. I have a story about that. A really interesting one.

I like playing with the search engines. I do it to make money a lot of times. Sometimes I just do it to see if I can. It's fun. I have been tempted to write random posts about people in my past that have pissed me off just to let them know that what goes around actually does come around the next time they Google themselves, but that's a little petty.

Some terms are hard. I had to write three posts about Zen to Done and link to my posts randomly to get on the first page of Google for the phrase. There's another link, by the way.

Some are easy. One post was all it took to bat around a few hackers. Just to let you know, if I thought these hackers were Kevin Mitnick caliber, I wouldn't be screwing with them so much. And all this has got me is a lot of links from forums that Google translator doesn't translate correctly.

A lot come out of nowhere. I get random porn term hits to this post about an Ashley Tisdale concert. I leave to you to guess what they are. But I guess the porn guys are slipping if this blog that has nothing to do with porn can get these hits. That post also got me a link from an MTV blog. So it does pay to randomly choose topics once and a while.

But some take a while and don't warn you beforehand.

A few months ago I got myself involved in a challenge to increase my Alexa ranking for Jamaica from Link Bait Me. So I did some research, checked out Jamaican news sites and found a story that I could barely find any info on at the time I wrote it. It was about Rhianna appearing at the Smile Jamaica Africa Unite concert. I thought this would get me some rank in Jamaica.

Nope. I dropped off the map for Jamaica and then proceeded to forget about it. But yesterday it had to boost my rank for Finland. Somehow I managed to stay on the first page of Google for the term way down at the bottom. But that was enough to give me 79 hits to that page yesterday, a majority from Finland.

Anyone have any ideas?


Stephan Miller

Written by

Kansas City Software Engineer and Author

Twitter | Github | LinkedIn

Updated