For some reason which completely baffles me, the posts that I write in this blog describing Leah’s Egypt report for her history class tend to rank high in Google’s search results whenever someone searches for information about ancient Egypt, especially the Egyptian pharaohs. For example, when you search for a phrase like “pharaohs when they died,” one of my early blog posts is the second item in Google’s search results (I even rank higher than Yahoo Answers or Wikipedia). I first noticed this a couple of months ago, and I mentioned it in a previous blog post. In the beginning, I found it amusing, but now I just find it annoying and perhaps even harmful to the mission of this blog. Everyday, Google directs at least two or three searchers to my blog. Traffic is a good thing, but this isn’t the right kind of traffic because the people who Google is sending to me aren’t interested in my blog and they certainly aren’t interested in my novel. At most, they probably spend only a minute or two at this site — long enough to realize that what I’ve written isn’t useful for them, and I’m afraid some of them leave thinking that I have somehow tricked them into visiting this site, which isn’t the case at all.
It’s a good thing I’m not partnered with Google Adsense. I suspect that if I were, then every commercial link on this blog would have something to do with Egypt.
So I’m going to take action to try to discourage people from looking for info about ancient Egypt via my blog. The first thing that I’m going to try is to rename the title, and tinker with the tags, of the specific blog entries that receive the most Google hits. The title of my blog posts always appear in the Google search results, so I’m thinking that if I insert a little message indicating that they shouldn’t click on the link, maybe that will help. If anyone reading this post has other suggestions for me, please leave them in the comments. We’ll see what happens, and I’ll keep you updated.
Revising Leah 