Lessons from Google, or How I Got My Dander Up

It’s a normal blogger thing: You look at who came to your blog, and how they got there. If your blog came up on the first page of a Google search for something important, you feel great. You’ve been validated – you’re the authority, you’re the man, you’re it. Coming up on the seventeenth page is all right, I suppose; but it doesn’t have that ego-tripping zing that the first page has.

So today, after one of my usual hectic Fridays, in the middle of preparations for a conference down in Eilat at which I’ll be lecturing on a subject I don’t know very much about (I was a last-minute emergency replacement – it’s a long story), I checked my SiteMeter report. Someone found On the Contrary with a search for “Holocaust ‘innocent Jews’” – fair enough, and I don’t even mind a fourth-page finish for search terms like that (sniffle, sob, bravely squares shoulders).

Ahh, but what do we have here? Another Google search that led to On the Contrary? Yes! And this time I made the first page! I’m even above the fold (assuming that someone printed out the Google page and folded it; On the Contrary is listed fifth out of ten items on the page). I’m enough of a closet journalist wannabe that being above the fold means something to me.

Oh, yes… the search. What was someone looking for when my blog – my erudite, controversial, noble, and otherwise admirable vehicle for self-expression and the enlightenment of the multitude – came up on the first page?

“Dander fluff”. Yes, folks, it turns out that Google considers On the Contrary to be the fifth most relevant and authoritative site on the entire Internet on the subject of “dander fluff”. I guess this proves that I’m not wasting my time blogging. No sir. Don’t mess with me, people: I’m The Dander Fluff Man!

The post that this desperately-dandered reader found wasn’t even all that much of a piece of fluff, really – it was about reactions inside Lebanon to the United Nations cease-fire resolution passed last month, and my reactions to the reactions. Ah well… I hope the guy enjoyed it.