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.

I'm starting to crack

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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