On Things You'd Rather Not Have Known

When you have a web page of any description, you are naturally curious as to who's visiting it, and why. One tool which helps with this is Google Analytics, and it is this which graces the pages of WhyNotSmile. Now, the advantage of Google Analytics, and other similar things, is that you can go and have a look, at any time, and find out how many people have viewed your site, where they live (like, roughly, i.e. which country, not their street and the colour of their front door or anything), and our topic for today, how they found you.

How they found you is split into various sections, including referring sites (the sites which have links to yours) and 'keywords', which are 'what they typed into Google and which led them to you'.

Referring sites are sometimes interesting, because you find links from all sorts of random things (at one point our church site was being linked to from a porn site), but keywords are even more fascinating.

The top one is usually the name of your site, and then the next couple are variations thereof: for instance, my top 3 keywords (well, phrases) are (1) "why not smile", (2) "why not smile blog" and (3) "whynotsmile". So far so good. Further down the list are things like "why not msile" and so on.

Number (4), however, is, rather unexpectedly, "Important anniversaries in 2009". I have no idea why, but it is true that if you type this phrase into Google (without quotes), WhyNotSmile is your top result. Furthermore, there are at least 6 further variations on this theme as you go down the list, and no less than a dozen people have been led to these pages in such a way.

The statistics also show that by far the most popular search terms (when you lump the variations together) leading to WhyNotSmile lately have been variations on The Apprentice, including "Lorraine fancies Ben The Apprentice", "Yasmina + Debra holding hands" and "Yasmina Debra relationship". Did I miss something? If I did, I'm not honestly sure I regret it.

However, my absolute favourite is at number (5) on the list: no less than 3 people have found WhyNotSmile by powering up Google and entering the immortal phrase "gay sex omeath".

I kid you not.