Poetic Justice

Part of the unseen work of running and maintaining a web site is running server log reports. These reports detail things like how many times in a given time span each web page has been visited, if the visitor came from a link on some other site and general site traffic statistics. The reports are very useful in helping us to gauge the effectiveness of various advertising/PR campaigns as well as measuring any differences site design changes might have caused.

This last weekend, I noticed that The Lifeguard started getting visitors referred from some sites we had not seen before -- porn search engines. It had me puzzled for a few hours but then the explanation became clear. These search engines (and I definitely will not mention them) had found their favorite keyword in some of our postings. The word is porn. Even though every mention of porn is in a negative context the search engine webbots dutifully reported back to their dark masters their success in finding it. The rapidity with which these dark minions found this site is astounding. I started SurfBuddies four years ago and it took eons (months) for the site to start showing up on the mainstream search engines.

After further reviewing the server logs I noticed another interesting tidbit. The post which was most visited was the post which contained the article "There is a special place in Hell for pornographic spam." Heh heh heh!!! Imagine the surprise of a porn searcher expecting one thing and landing on that post.

Who knows? Maybe a little good will come of it.