Search Engines and Vapor Rub

If you have a blog, I highly recommend utilizing a service like Blogflux's MapStats. It tracks where people are from who are visiting your blog, what brought them there (like a referring page), or what they were searching for on Google. It's cool to see people from around the world end up at Spoiled for the Ordinary.

I put the widget in my blog when I returned from Germany last year. I posted some pics from the Calling All Nations event we went to, and my link got posted on the website. So last July and August I received a ton of hits, with a majority of them international. Cool. For a while my traffic dropped in the fall as that link faded on that site, but it has been climbing since January.

I think the funniest thing about MapStats is checking out what search phrase people used to end up at this blog. Some of them make sense. "Jason Joyner," "Spoiled for the Ordinary" are at the top. My #2 search phrase is my review of the Song of Albion series by Stephen Lawhead for one of the first CSFF tours. Now I'm on the first page of Google for that phrase. I posted about the NBC show Heroes when it first started, so I got a lot of hits from that last fall. Not as many now, as I don't follow the show. There are phrases for books I've reviewed. I can understand why people would search for these things.

However...there are some pretty goofy things that I've had visits from:

Vick's Vapor Rub Expiration Date - I've had several searches for this! Hope they liked my tale of woe.

David Crowder and Evil Squirrels - Enough said.

Dinosaur ninjas - Um...yeah. Why would someone be searching for this anyway (and how did I end up posting about it?) My only guess is that it somehow involves John C. Wright.

One person came here looking for "spoiled teenager help". I can see how they'd be confused. Here's my advice: smack 'em, they probably earned it somewhere.

And my personal favorite: "cramer short squeeze tmy april 2007". I have no idea what they wanted or what they found here. I can only hope it wasn't for nefarious purposes.

If you don't have this widget, plug it in. It's easy, and it's good fun.