So, my blog is almost 6 months old (it feels like I’ve been blogging for years!) and I’ve discovered that I can finally start looking at my blog-stats in a more meaningful way. If I could dedicate more time to this hobby (which actually feels more like a part-time job) then I could definitely try to improve my SEO, I could go through my content with a fine tooth comb and I could probably do a better job of analysing my stats. However, at the minute I’m just too busy…
One thing I have discovered is that people are finding me more and more frequently through search engines, which is great. I love seeing what people have been searching for when they stumbled upon me. But one thing that has really been getting on my nerves lately is the “unknown search terms” – and they’re growing every month.
I get online security and privacy, I really do. But sometimes I just wish I could see all of these terms!
662 unknown search terms. Are you kidding me? I wanna know what these are!! Am I the only person this annoys, is there anyone out there that understands my plight?!
While putting this post together and going through my search times, I ended up giggling a little, so I thought I’d share some of the more funny ones!
“beautiful oblivion by katie mcgarry twist ending explanation”
Really? I won’t be overly pedantic about the wrong author, but really? I wish I could write a post that explains Beautiful Oblivion, I at least attempted it in my review. I should also note I have many search terms similar to this!
“drown the gown stupid trend”
Is this a real thing? Should I search this and find out? Or is this related to girls in dresses on book covers? Drown the Gown – now there’s a post title I could work with. Except I don’t mind dresses on covers, as I’ve previously mentioned here.
“i don’t lend books”
I hear ya. In fact, I’m doing a post on my Bookish-OCD soon including why I find it particularly difficult to lend books to people. Not sure why this statement would be used as a search term though…
“hate a book dislike all characters goodreads”
Alrighty then. That sounds a little angst-ridden. Would you like to talk about it? And why would you search for a book that matches that description? Surely that book should be avoided. Disliking characters and hating a book are two very separate things though – another post I intend to do shortly.
“blog shelf-stacker home husband”
I’m not sure… I don’t… Hmm…
“read jamie mcguire beautiful oblivion online free”
Nope. No. Nada. Get yourself off my blog.
“how many months to know sex of baby”
Well, I doubt this blog gave you the answer. I’d love to know where you ended up. It’s around five months though, right?
“i hate dolores umbridge”
May all Harry Potter fans unite and say an “amen” to this one! I’m assuming this person landed here. Again though, why would you type that statement into a search engine?! Am I the only person who searches logically?
“sheldon why so serious”
Do you get frustrated at “unknown search terms”? What are some of your favourite terms people have searched for when they ended up on your blog? Get sharing with me in the comments below!
Confessions of a Book Geek 
This post is wonderful, Rachel. You got me laughing with your responses! I’ve had some interesting terms, too… And I totally understand the feelings when it comes to the unknown search terms. It’s gotten to the point for me that all I get are referrals from unknown terms! Come on, I’m curious! I must know! Haha 😉
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Thank you, Emily! I’ve decided to finally start writing up my original post ideas and schedule them in, if it means I post less frequently that’s OK, I’m just moving towards wanting to write all the posts I have as drafts! I want to know what those searches were soo bad lol R x
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Lately I’ve had a surplus of original discussion post ideas that I have handwritten that I have to type up. I plan to save them for the weeks after school starts when I won’t have as many reviews!
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I tend to add the title and rough idea in as a draft post (I’ve 15 of them so far!) but I need to go back and write them. I’m planning on doing it soon. I went through a phase of posting 5/6 days a week, and I’m thinking of cutting back on the number of posts per week and increasing original content now that I’ve found my “voice” a bit more. I recently read a few posts about Blitz and Tours, and I was contemplating not doing them anymore, I’ve started a post about it. I ended up with 2/3 of them last week due to bad scheduling, which I try to avoid, but I think I’m going to keep doing it my way – which is to participate in ones I’m genuinely interested in and to offer readers the chance to enter giveaways, but I’m cutting back on tours. I don’t do many anyways but I have a backlist TBR pile to get through! That was a tangent! Lol R x
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I’m gonna have to start paying attention to my search terms, some of these are hilarious!
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Thanks for commenting! I love seeing how people have found me R x
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HAHA that last one!!
Sometimes really weird terms get searched for on my blog, it’s bizzarre. So is this things people have typed into google and your blog has come up or…? I’ve always been a little hazy on that
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I know!! Lol. If it’s the search engine terms then yep – someone has typed it into a search engine and your blog has come up. If it’s in-site searching it’s stuff people have typed into your search box on your blog – which can be just as strange! Though I can’t seem to find those in my stats… R x
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haha mine are all to do with fairy tales, it seems!!
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No funny ones?? R x
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sadly not : (
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OMG that last picture is perfect! I totally feel your frustration with this one. I wonder why WordPress won’t show all of them?
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Thanks, Holly! At least now they’ll have something to find if they search for it! As far as I know it isn’t WordPress, it’s search engine privacy settings preventing us from seeing them!
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I love the search terms function – some of them are so funny. I’m doing a post on my blog similar to yours on Friday 🙂
This one is brilliant: “blog shelf-stacker home husband” – What? LOL
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Oh, link me up to it when you post it so I can see! I don’t even know what that search is supposed to mean!! R x
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Apparently people have twice found my blog by searching “The Tenant of Wildfell Hall gay subtext”… guys, don’t ask me, I haven’t read it yet! And someone else found me by searching “Midnight Crossroad sex scenes”. There are none, sorry!
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Lol! Have you even mentioned the book on your blog in a haul or something? Midnight crossroad sex scenes… Interesting!!
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Yeah, mentioned Tenant twice (classics club and on a review of Agnes Grey) but nothing more than the name really and did a review of Midnight Crossroad 🙂 I wonder if the person was hoping they’d find blow by blow descriptions of the sex scenes?!
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Probably – but could have been for a legit reason – can you hear the defensive-ness in my tone?! Lol I wrote a post about 50 Shades of Grey and had to look up some of the sexier excerpts for the post without flicking through all of the books… lol R x
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Haha but that’s different! Far too much craziness going on in those books to flick through casually 😉
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Hahaha this is great! I’ve gotten some pretty funny and random ones too, though I seem to get unknown a lot more. 650 is a bit ridiculous though…haha I especially love the baby gender one. How in the world did that come up? It’s 15 weeks btw 😉
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Thanks, Victoria! There’s soo many unknown and I’m soo curious! What if they’re important for me to know?! 15 weeks?! I thought a baby was the size of half a banana at that point. My biology qualifications were clearly lost on me!! Lol R x
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Haha yeah me too! And I know it’s pretty crazy! My sister is pregnant and we were holding our breath until 15 weeks when we could find out 🙂
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Ahhh! Yay, to being an Auntie! R x
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Yes! Thank you! 🙂
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HAHA! Hilarious post. I am beyond pleased that I am not the only person who has been writing up about their bookish OCD. Mine is ridiculous. My post has been written up for weeks but I keep editing it. I sound like a completely INSANE person. And I wish I was kidding. But I come across as if I am actually crazy. Might avoid posting that one forever 😉
I have Blogger and I don’t think they let you see them as well as that. Although, almost all of mine are people who are looking for non-disney animated movies. I think it’s because I did a post on my top 20 fan non-disney animated films. That Part 1 post has almost 10,000 views because of it.
Wish I could look at more of mine, I am sure there are some hilarious ones in there.
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Yea, I need to link to a few posts that were inspiration for it, but I have 3/4 drafts done for different things and need to take the time this weekend to write them up, one of them is on my bookish quirks. Haha you should post it! I think you’d be surprised how many of them other people will have in common with you, or be completely opposed to, they always make for good reading. Like, I crack the spines on basically all my books, I love a satisfying spine crack, but I NEVER dog-ear pages, I’d rather leave it open face-down than dog-ear, which often means my books want to stay open on that page! Lol
Wow, that’s some views! Was that entirely accidental? I wonder if some bloggers are super smart and pick topics not only because they want to write about them, but because it will be popular with views too… I should think about that lol I’ve never seen a blogger dashboard, is it not as detailed at all? R x
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OMG! Some people search for the most random things. I had to look back over my own site stats. But the best one i have so far is
‘erotic romance stories about what a man does to a woman when he licks his lips’
Strange, strange people
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LOL! Surely, it makes her go weak in the knees?! Haha, thanks for commenting! R x
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Ugh, unknown search terms annoy me. It’s all because of Google though. Google recently stopped providing keyword searches. They encrypt everyone’s connection, which means they can no longer send keyword search data to stats programs. You can read more about it here: http://blog.hubspot.com/marketing/google-encrypting-all-searches-nj
So any keywords you do see are probably coming from search engines other than Google.
It sucks because I loved looking at that data. 😦
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I was hoping you could fill us in!
I don’t know why they would do that! Key search terms are so important for marketers too, do you know if there’s an alternative that can be used, or if there’s plans to change it? It’s very annoying, while it could be humorous at times, it was also very important info.
R x
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Sadly there are no plans to change it. Ultimately Google is trying to promote safer web browsing and searching, which means using SSL everywhere. But when you use SSL, your browsing data is encrypted and just can’t be sent to third parties (like stats programs). I understand their reasons, and ultimately it is a good reason (trying to enforce safety and privacy), but it is frustrating!!
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Most of mine make sense even if they are a little weird, but this one:
“this is what’s left of my childhood” ????
What is that?
It is certainly possible to find out baby gender earlier, but the most common way to find out is at the 20 week ultrasound, so you’re correct in saying about 5 months. 🙂
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I don’t understand why people search for those terms, we need to start writing self-help posts. I thought it was a little older. Except here some hospitals refuse to tell you at all. They were being sued for giving out the wrong gender when couples were buying all their baby stuff. Crazy! R x
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Oh good grief! I found out the gender of both my children at about 20 weeks. My oldest is a boy and we did paint the nursery sky blue but all the big purchases – furniture, decor, stroller, etc. – I kept gender neutral because I wanted to be able to use it again with my second child. Good thing too, since my younger child is a girl!
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I used to love putting posts together where I get the funniest search terms from my blog! But since they changed the privacy policies, I hardly get any search terms to show up
The worst are the read X book online free ones – GET OFF MY BLOG FOOL!
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I’m still getting some, but no where near as many as I would like! I think it makes it tougher for us too when it comes to knowing what’s popular on our blogs and what we should write more of. While we’re not here to make money, I’m sure all of us would like to increase our exposure and grow our communities! Those are the worst! More fool them for trying – I should do a blog post on it and they’d land on it lol R x
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I never really understood SEO? should i care about it lol
the baby would lead to the spillage of my soda (if i currently had one . aah, SPRITE)
lovely post
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[…] Rachel says: Damn you ‘unknown search terms!’ […]
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Up until recently all my search engine hits were unknown search terms. Now everybody’s searching for If I Stay spoilers and my review has spoilers (with a warning) so along with the unknown ones, I also get those.
Sometimes I do searches similar to “hate a book dislike all characters goodreads” if I’m looking for other people who didn’t like a popular book. But usually I’ll just go to Goodreads and set the filter to one star reviews.
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It’s hard to know what people will search for, isn’t it? It must make sense to them at the time, but to us looking at it, it just looks off lol
I don’t think I use all of the Goodreads functionality – but I struggle with time!
R x
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Definitely – but I work in Marketing so it’s a general work life frustration.
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I hear you! They drive me crazy too, I’m so nosy. My funniest one is ‘Hermione granger’s kickers! I swear there is no mention of those on my blog :O
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HAHA – Oh no!! How dare someone ruin my childhood favourite! R x
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[…] This month’s features included: An introduction to a brand-new feature called (S)He Said and the first (S)He Said Discussion (Let’s Get It On), I shared more Bloggy Love #2, interviewed author Peter Monn (includes a giveaway!), discussed Book Buying Bans and Me, and ranted in Damn You “Unknown Search Terms!”. […]
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[…] My most popular post in August (apart from TTT posts) was Damn You “Unknown Search Terms”! […]
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I hate the unknown search terms! I want to use them to drive more traffic to my site! UGH! Is there anyway to get rid of this??
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Apparently not, it’s to do with Google’s privacy settings for users – so while that’s great and all, it does mean we miss out on helping SEO.
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I hate the unknown search terms! I want to know what people are searching for I can better serve them!!!!
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Very true, another reason they are annoying!
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[…] that led them to my little corner of the Internet. The post published in August 2014 was titled Damn You “Unknown Search Terms“, and began as a gripe towards Internet privacy settings, which meant so many of the search […]
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