Warning: Semi-adult language to follow.

Yesterday I was looking at the stats for this blog to see if the article about Winston-Salem bloggers on the front page of the Winston-Salem Journal led to an increase in traffic over the normal three or four wackos who normally read this thing.  Sure enough the traffic about doubled, but I found something even more interesting.

You see the stats show where every visitor came from and the majority of visitors come from search engines.  If I click on the link it takes me to the search engine and shows me the search term that was used and the page on which my blog appeared.  Here’s a small sample of some of the terms, the search engine they were used on and where some page on my blog ranked for those terms on the search engines:

• tyco chicken illegal aliens (Google, #1)
• nudist blog (Google, #42)
• inside of ant hills  (Google, #1)
• battambang cattle industry 2006 (MSN, #3)
• Ernest Angley (Yahoo, #14)
• "ed cone" asshole (Google, #40)

Obviously I have a warped mind if I’m writing posts that pull in people interested in illegal chicken processors, nudists, wannabe anteaters, obscure indian cattle data and crazy televangelists.  But when I got to that last one I was kind of bothered.  I mean what had I written that woul equate Greensboro’s "blogfather" with a negative anatomical description/epithet?  Ends up that it was this post and the anatomical reference wasn’t even about Ed.

Side note to Ed: You might want to find out who is so motivated to go four pages deep in a Google search for that phrase; me-thinks there’s someone out there with a thing for you.

Well, this got me to wondering what would happen if I searched "jon lowder" asshole in Google.  So I did and I found that the search returned about 160 results.  The top result was the same post that featured Ed and then number two was on Ed’s blog so I guess we’re even.  Number five was a post on Vie de Malchance, number six was on Billy the Blogging Poet, number seven was another Ed Cone post and number eight was Patrick Eakes.  These are all Greensboro blogs and people I’ve corresponded with so I started wondering if perhaps I’d done something untoward.

So I followed the links and found out that on Vie’s blog I was an innocent bystander and checking Billy’s blog I only find myself referenced in his blog roll so I guess I’m an innocent bystander there too.  On to Ed’s other post and I find that it is recent and interesting in terms of the comments, but I had nothing to do with it other than the fact that my name is on Ed’s blog roll.  On Patrick’s I find that I have nothing to do with it other than the fact that my name is on his blog roll too.

The dim light over my head is beginning to glow.  It appears that if you use two terms, supposedly unrelated, they can pop up in search.  So although I haven’t found an instance where someone has called me an asshole I’m certainly being lumped in with many assholes.  Obviously I’ve probably done the same on my blog so I’m going to use this space to issue a blanket apology to all the victims of my random a-holes and other nefarious comments.