I’ve been glancing through my blog stats. Actually not glancing – it’s been more purposeful than that. I thought I’d noticed a pattern in the search terms people were using to get here, and it turns out I was right.
About a year ago, I published a post that looked at the background to my short story, The Haircut of a More Successful Man. Its central character is over-attached to his hairdresser and has an active imagination and fantasy life. Among the tags, mainly as a joke, I included ‘hairdresser porn’. I had no idea that was a thing, or something people would search for. Wrong.
Since then, week after week, ‘hairdresser porn’ has figured prominently among the search terms that have brought people here. I hope not too many are unhappy when they discover all I’ve got to offer is a story, ie, words on a page.
So, now I’ve gone and reviewed the all time stats for searches that have led people here. Despite the hairdresser piece having been around for only half the life of the blog, here are the top search terms, out of seriously hundreds:
1. nick earls
2. nick earls blog
3. hairdresser porn
If you added the searches for ‘shampoo porn’ to #3, it’d move into second spot. Yes, more people get to my blog through searching for niche porn than searching for my blog. ‘Shampoo porn’ ranks #7 and ‘porn hairdresser’ and ‘hair dresser porn’ are in the top 20. Several more variants made the top 50.
Also in the top 10 were ‘nick earles’ and ‘nick earl’, so either people are looking for someone else or my lifelong quest to get people to spell my name correctly is far from over.
So, if this blog was all about traffic, it turns out I’d be getting it badly wrong running with tags like ‘Amazon’ and ‘free ebooks’.
So today’s post is an experiment. It’s all about the tags. I’ve picked a few that Google acknowledges as world favourites and thrown in a few more (including at least one I hope I never see in use). I’m interested to see how much impact tags really have. For anyone else interested, I’ll post some figures when enough have come through.
For anyone lured here by the tags and feeling let down that I’m not delivering, peas can help constipation in most aquarium fish but it’s best to get species-specific advice. Sadly I’m no help with any matters related to Mila Kunis. Still unsatisfied? Please click on the ‘Free Stuff’ section and help yourself to some fiction. It’s the least I can do. If you’ve fluked the right day, it might even be the hairdresser story (sadly still without video, but you have imaginations, right?)
Nick Earls 
This post made me laugh! Especially your tags…the naked thing was expected, I guess…but the fish? Fish keeping must be more popular than I thought! (and constipation in fish must also be more common than one may think…)
P.S I’m not sure if “Kevin Rudd naked” will bring many hits, but I didn’t think the fish thing would be so popular, so I will probably be proven wrong
Thanks you for the Sunday afternoon chuckle.
My name is Nick Earls too. I’ve been dealing with the Nick Earl and Nick Earles thing my whole life. Funny post by the way. Carry on.
It’s great to hear from you. I think we’re a very rare species. The only other Nick Earls I’ve seen anything about was finishing school somewhere like Kentucky in the late 90s. I’m doing my best to retrain people when it comes to our name, but stats suggest they aren’t fast learners. Maybe you could get megafamous. That’d turn it around. Everyone can spell Kardashian now.
You just don’t know how many kinky people out there would love to see these people sans clothes, but I’m guessing you’re about to find out. I’m looking forward to the results. I reckon the three people who googled The Adventures of Justine and ended up at my blog The Adventures of Justin Beaver were very disappointed.
This post made me laugh (as they often do), and also made me check my own stats. My blog is no longer the top Google hit for the term Bacon Erotica. Progress!
While it looks as if the Urban Dictionary is now #1 for bacon erotica, maybe you can take some credit for putting it there?
I’ve just added bacon erotica to my tags in solidarity.
Ha Har Hardy Hard…:-\ Priceless as in on a tag. Let’s not forget Christmas…
Hilarious! Can’t wait to hear the results of this experiment. Some of the more interesting search terms that have brought people to my blog are “sexual tension between strangers” “cally triangle” and “peg on nose”!
I can confidently say no one’s found their way to my blog courtesy of ‘peg on nose’. Part of me wants to believe those three searches were the one person, looking for something very particular and unusual.
Dear Nic Earl,
OMG! I think my partner is singlehandedly responsible for googling how to solve constipation in aquarium fish… We have not one but 7 tanks under our house now and this is why we had to get a bigger house.. Anne-Maree
if you manage to get a hit on “Kevin Rudd naked” I wanna know.
I’m hopeful. ‘Kevin Rudd naked’ scores an awesome 3288 hits on Google, and my blog post is sitting at a tempting #2.
Fascinating. I look forward to seeing the results, and finding out how many people are trawling the intenet for naked pictures of you.
You could attract a whole new quality of spam with that approach 😉
I wrote a post a long time ago about white feathers as a symbol of cowardice. It continues to this day to be the most popular search term for people visiting my blog….