Sunday, November 26, 2006
Man, you really have to be careful what you put out there. It's permanent!
About half the visits to this blog are as a result of a search engine finding some word or phrase (and some of those searches are very strange. People don't know how to search. I'd like to do a whole entry on that sometime).
About half of those search engine hits are for one word in one particular entry that I am now sorry I wrote. Anything I write about myself or my family I don't mind being out there, no matter what it says, and anything I wrote about friends who might find this, it's not so much about them as about my reaction, to which I am entitled and which I can defend. But there's one particular entry that's entirely about someone else, and I really screwed up. I used a term that's popular in (what I consider) an abnormal offshoot of p0rn0graphy (I didn't use it in a p0rn0graphic way), and a lot of people who make me cringe are finding that entry because of that word.
(I'm learning. See how I just diverted searches for p0rn?)
Anyway, it wouldn't normally bother me. Every entry that mentions the Hairless Hunk, for example, gets a lot of hits from people looking for something titillating, and I don't mind those hits. But the post that worries me is, like I said, about someone else, it's speculation and very personal, and the weirdos who get off on that particular thing WILL find it ... um ... lip-smackingly salacious, shall we say. In fact, they have been recommending it to each other. I found a link to it on a site that worries me. (Note that the post is innocent, unless your mind is bent!)
I have considered editing the post to remove the offending word, but that would simply call attention to it, since it would be picked up on feeds as if it were a new entry. It would be better to delete it, but deleting it won't help, because it will continue to exist in caches and possibly archives. Worse, the more hits it gets, the more hits it will get, because it moves up in the search order, and will stay in caches longer. Ouch.
I cringe every time I see another visit from a search on that word. Most of them are coming from Northwestern Europe and the Philippines. Strange people there.
When I wrote that entry, I didn't know that people could find it so easily because of the topic. I didn't realize people would be searching for that topic! (And I'm not really sorry I wrote it - it was something I needed to do at the time. I'm just sorry it can't be better protected from misuse.)
Learn from my pain. Disguise provocative words.
The trick is to know which words might be provocative. At the time, I'd never have thought of "that" word as interesting to weird people.
1 comment:
Very interesting. On Live Journal, there's a feature when you set up your user account that can divert robots from scanning your pages. They can still be found, but it discourages robots from indexing your pages. I don't know if Blogger has that sort of thing, but you might want to check into it and see if you can somehow make your journal more difficult for the search engines to find. Your account has already come up in many searches for other stuff. So, like you said, the more they find you, the more they'll find you...
Post a Comment