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How do people come to your blog?
Has it ever happened to you that visitors come to your blog via completely unrelated keywords. Say you run a travel site but visitors come via “tamil woman saree bathing“? Well, we at Cook Like a Bong regularly get such search engine traffic hilarious moments. This post is about how google messes up while directing visitors to bengalicuisine.net.
One of the tasks of a webmaster is to understand what are people looking for when search engines send them your way. For instance, this being a site on Bengali cuisine, I would expect visitors to come here while searching for Bengali food, Bengali recipes, Bengali rasgulla, Chanchra, bangali ranna etc .
However, sometimes the keywords that send traffic range from uncommon, to weird, to outright irrelevant. Here’s 5 such keyword strings:
Mishti doi food poisoning
I’ve heard of food poisoning being caused from meat, raw foods, and unwashed vegetables. But never from consuming Mishti Dahi. Medicine sites say that the symptoms of food poisoning are vomiting and abdominal cramping.
The natural question, then, is: why was someone looking for how to prepare Mishti Doi that causes vomiting? OMG. Did we inadvertently participate in some ‘killer intent’? Or, ‘how to fake pregnancy to your husband’? Just when I was about to get excited about all this, google search spilled the beans.
The first result on Google for Mishti Doi food poisoning is Sudeshna’s post on Bhapa Chingri (Steamed Shrimp). Phew! Figure out why.
How to color diyas crafts
I was surprised at first. After all, why would someone looking for craft activities like how to color diyas would come to a Bengali cooking site. But then it dawned. One year after writing a post on Diwali Diya Daler Bada, Google suddenly started sending loads of visitors to this post. Evidently, one of them turned unlucky. Check out the post for some colorful diwali diyas.
Advisable to eat rohu in monsoon?
Well, Sudeshna has talked about rohu fish (or rui maach) in 3 posts – Macher Dimer Vada (Roe fritter), Macher Jhol (Fish Curry) and Doi Rui (Rohu Yogurt gravy) and about monsoon in 5 posts. But never, I repeat never, has she advised on whether to eat rohu in monsoon.
Being a Bengali almost always automatically meant that you ‘have to’ love fish (in addition to several other bong connection myths). And now do search engines also expect a Bengali cook to even advice on seasonal variation in safety factors of eating any variety of fish. Duh!
Morola.com
A quick google search will return results that start with Motorola.com And why not? Commonsense dictates the odds of someone looking for Motorola.com is higher than ABengaliWordforaFish.com. More than Google’s misplaced results, what surprised me more was who on earth wants to search for a website like NameofTheFish.com?
Pepped up, I searched for several such sites and here’re the results…
rui.com will redirect you to a golf and tennis website
ilish.com and katla.com seem cybersquatters
pabda.com or chingri.com don’t even exist and
tangra.com is a web solutions provider. Indeed, curiosity killed the cat. 😛

Which Beatles record started as egg and bacon?
Yes, Beatles composed a song ‘Yesterday’, whose lyrics had words like eggs, omlette, ham, cheese and bacon. In fact, this is one of the few songs that talk of egg delicacies. Sample this:
Scrambled eggs,
Good for breakfast, dinner time or brunch,
Don’t buy six or twelve, buy a bunch,
And we’ll have a lunch on scrambled eggs.
But would Paul McCartney have thought in his lifetime that someone looking for his famous song would come across a how to cook Scrambled Eggs post at a Bengali food website? Hell no.
Well, I guess you have traffic coming from such funny keywords too. Please share a few here.
Images Courtesy: Danny Sullivan and 1HappySnapper
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I have something for you over at my website
http://www.thecolorsofindiancooking.com/2010/01/get-award-pass-it-forward.html
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Hi
Great post…..pretty hilarious though to know that Mishti doi food poisoning wud lead to bengali food blog
.-= Rujuta´s last blog ..Something Special……..29th January… =-.
Indeed. Here’re more – prano bhoriye indrani sen, baby chicken drinking, how to fix burnt smell from curry et al.
Looks like I need another post to ‘express’ my bewilderment.
ohh truly cracking..totally agreed..dunno what are they doing?
Oh, they are into next generation search called Google Caffeine. Lets see whether that improves the results. 🙂
This post helps to understand the traffic….. to our blogs at times…. Funny though…. I have come across several incidents while I Google, things… Leads elsewhere…. which in no way connects…. WEIRD!!!!!!!
Ash….
(http://asha-oceanichope.blogspot.com/)
Yeah true. Looking for “baby chicken drinking” may lead you to a bengali cooking site or “the old man and the sea” directs you to a travel website. 🙂