Accidental Search Engine Optimisation

I have always thought Search Engine Optimisation (or ‘SEO’ – see Wikipedia) was a dark art, but I have been very surprised to suddenly see some of my blog pages appearing high on the list of Web searches. This blog is a bit of a covert and creative outlet for me, so I have just been happy to express myself in an anonymous but public way. I only post blog entries very infrequently, and make no attempt to publicise my blog at all. However, in the last couple of months, I have suddenly seen my visitor stats shooting up – through general search queries, rather than any site cross-references. See the graph below – as you can see, the site has been dawdling along for a couple of years and suddenly, there is a big upward trend now – January 2008 – and we are only mid-way through the month:

All the hits are being generated from search engine traffic. Top searches have been “visa card” and “californication lawsuit”. I haven’t been able to work out where the visa card searches are coming from (WordPress doesn’t give you that information), but when I do a Google search for “californication lawsuit”, my blog entry sits at number four on the list. Based on the popularity of “visa card” in searches, an old page on the site – Token-based Security for Visa? - is getting a lot of hits.

I will keep digging around to see if I can find out where these searches are coming from, but it doesn’t seem to be from the two big ones – Google or Yahoo!… Maybe there is a sleeper search engine out there about to take off?

eBay Search Sux

There was a great story yesterday about a carpet python swallowing four golf balls, thinking they were chicken eggs: “Augusta the snake’s charity drive“. The snake, dubbed “Augusta”, successfully underwent emergency surgery to remove the golf balls and now a clever person from the Queensland Gold Coast’s Currumbin Wildlife Sanctuary has put the golf balls, together with Xrays and photos from the surgery, up on eBay to raise money for the not-for-profit organisation.

Was it easy to find the item on eBay? You would think so, wouldn’t you? I first went to eBay Australia (www.ebay.com.au) and typed in “Currumbin”, “golf” and “ball”. Nothing. I tried “snake”, “golf” and “ball”. Nothing. I tried “Augusta” and “snake”. No luck. Maybe, I thought, its been listed on eBay USA. I went to www.ebay.com and tried the various permutations. Lots of hits, but nothing remotely like the one I was after.

Instead, I went to Google and typed in the same search terms – Bingo! Number eight on the list was the eBay entry I was looking for: http://cgi.ebay.com.au/worlds-first-ingested-golf-balls-from-a-snake_W0QQitemZ320203408706QQihZ011QQcategoryZ10874QQcmdZViewItem.

How ridiculous is that? The search mechanism on eBay’s own website is unable to turn up the item I am looking for, but the general Internet search engine Google can? My suggestion is that news agencies start putting links in their stories when they write about interesting items up for sale on eBay, otherwise the majority of prospective punters are going to struggle to find the item and make a bid. In the meantime, eBay needs to get its act together. Maybe that rumour last year about eBayahoo (http://themangle.wordpress.com/2006/05/25/yahoo-and-ebay-to-launch-ebayahoo/) might help eBay’s cause…