The Columnist Manifesto

Blogging about the Google searches that lead people to one's own blog has become quite the meme. See here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here and -- the earliest-dated post I know of that did this, and thus the presumptive creator of the meme -- here. (Though that honor probably belongs here.)

(This is not to be confused with the related but different meme of checking one's own google ranking for certain searches: e.g., here and here.)

What I refer to as the "Evil Meme" is when a blogger finds that a particularly irksome Google search leads to her blog. I've noticed a couple of blogs pointing out how their blogs came up in searches for porn sites. (See, e.g., here.)

At one point, I was the number four hit for "big butt tv," a phrase I used to describe my 1988 Mitsubishi TV with its huge cathode-ray tube protruding out the backside in comparison to a sleek new flatscreen. Fortunately, I'm no longer anywhere near the top of that search, thanks no doubt to the advent of a porn site by the same name.

The paradox here is that by blogging about unwanted Google search referral traffic, we bloggers inevitably repeat the phrase that created the search right in the complaining post. Which will of course produce more Google hits for that search. As Moral Turpitude once put it:

I probably shouldn't use the word "porn" in my blog. I'll end up with random perverts cruising in from google searches. YOU perverts are perfectly random enough for me already.

By the way, when in my post yesterday I refered to F*ck as a TAT, I should have added that it's also a GAT (Google Avoidance Technique). One of my commenters used the full, spelled out word several times in the comments, so....

... welcome Google-referred porn-heads!