More on Technology: Blog Search Terms

I've tried an experiment over the last few weeks in which I made my blog visible to Google searches. I was curious whether it would bring in more regular readers and what kinds of searches would bring people to the site. What follows is an index of search terms, location from which the search was (either city or especially interesting institutional network), and a link to the page that the search led to.

Search Term — Location — Page Returned

ben ezra synagogue cairo — Protestant Theological Institute, Netherlands — Little Boxes

daniel's vision writing on the wall hebrew — San Bruno, CA — The Writing on the Wall

vatican textual scholarship — Temple University, Philadelphia, PA — Bashing Textual Scholarship 

st therese of the child jesus prayer — Staffordshire, UK — Christian Arabic Paper Ephemera

dr shakshuka tel aviv — Amsterdam — Old Jaffa in Nine and a Half Chapters

bialik story — Dauphin, Manitoba — Beit Biyalik

As you can see, I've not gotten any real howlers — ridiculous searches that lead, ridiculously, to my blog. (Although I did get one spam advertising comment from the Marbella Golfing Club.) But I also don't think that the people doing these searches are finding what they're looking for. And the sort of people who might be interested in my blog or might prove interesting as commenters don't seem to be doing searches that are leading them here. I'll leave the blog visible to search engines for a little longer, but barring the revelation of some really compelling reason, I'm going to set it back to being invisible. Visibility doesn't seem to have any benefits for me or for googlers.