For no reason at all, I thought I'd post some of my favorite search phrases that have brought traffic to SEOmoz this year. After all, if it's interesting to me... it's probably boring the pants off you, which is why I posted it on a Friday afternoon, when you should be spending time with loved ones and the June sun.
- Hot Young Things
26 referrals this year
This must be because of the age group of the staff we've assembled and the fact that it's often warm near the windows. - Animals in Pants Commercial
28 referrals this year
Due to legal issues, I won't be commenting on this one, but I can say that we don't provide commercial services in this arena. - 20 questions
78 referrals this year
Do you think people have this many about SEO, or they just want to play? - Yellow Shoes
86 referrals this year
No Amazon link to the Pumas with traffic at this level... - Oh Ye of Little Faith
27 referrals this year
Praise be unto SEO for curing what ails you, my web brethren! - Bad Neighborhoods
23 referrals this year
We're not quite Detroit, or East LA, but we're getting there
Any favorite referrals to your sites you'd like to share?
It is interesting to see what brings traffic in the door. I had a commentary style site a while back and it used to get traffic for 'child $@' which was horrific.
It turns out that I used the word "$@" in a post relating to how people in our neighborhood did not watch over their children in a proper manner. The kids were always running out into traffic, hitting cars with rocks, and doing similar things while their parents sat on on their stoops and just watched the kids tear up personal and public property. I was just fed up and chose to use that explative which was not a smart thing to do.
Google paired the explative and the word 'child' together even though they were nowhere near each other in the page copy. I felt sick when I started seeing 50+ referrals each month.
I felt better when I started sniffing out those referrals and redirecting the traffic to my states sex offenders list until I pulled the site down.
I never would have guessed that a search engine would have paird those words and ranked the site accordingly. Looking at the referral phrases all the way down to the low numbers can often point to potential problems.
Hey all,I do have a question per "referral" tracking. Recently I submitted my product feeds to several shopping engines including Nextag and Thefind, they do direct good traffic to my site as shown in my GA reports. But one thing I don't get is: I tagged the url as "&utm_source=thefind&utm_medium=shoppingengine", I assume what I should be getting in GA reports is sth. like "thefind/shoppingengine"; however, I have here "thefind/referral" instead. What can be the problem, or does it mean that I actually didn't get any traffic from my product feeds, can anyone help?Millions thanks!
weirdest one ive seen for one of the sites I work on is WHERE BUY COCAINE INTERNATIONAL RX (yes, all in caps) The site in question is a vitamin site. all legit, let me assure you.
At Autobytel, I used to get quite a few referrals from MSN for 'car rotten egg smell'. No problems because we sold advertiser traffic at a pretty high CPM so I took all the traffic I could get ;)
I've seen some of my sites rank for the occasional under-age type of "hot young things" once in a while. I have no idea why Google would rank me in the top 40 for that!
Gave me a scare before I realized it must be G being very broken!
Pierre
I love doing this too, especially for sites that I haven't paid much attention to for a few months at a time...if you really want to see interesting referrals, launch an Amazon clone or something to that affect and come back to it a year later to see how people found you -- making money in the process is great, sure, but the vast and vivid variety is very vindicating for long-tail SEOs.