You Know Who You Are

For the last six months or so I’ve been looking at stats on my blog site. It tells me how many hits I’ve had and which countries the pages have been viewed from and less interesting, which internet browsers have been used to access my site. I get an average of 22 hits a day (it sometimes hits 50 when I do something really interesting!) and not surprisingly, the UK and France are the countries where most of the readers are based, although Ukraine and Lebanon are surprising inclusions.

To me this is merely interesting although to someone who has adverts on their site (I removed mine pretty quickly after Google started pushing ‘holidays in France’), it helps work out whether they are likely to get any money or not and allows the blogger to ‘sell’ their site to advertisers.

My stats were provided by a 3^rd party company (Easycounter) who have no interest in my blog site, but obviously Google, that all-seeing behemoth, decided that they too should have a stats service and I’ve been looking at their new system with interest.

Unlike the 3^rd party provider, Google includes some data which allows you to establish where the viewers are and in some cases, gives you a clue to their identity and it was this that I was looking at the other day.

Now, I hate casting aspersions (or asparagus even) but one of the tenuous links was to a person who shall remain nameless but a Google search on their name came up with a guy whose main claim to fame was that he’d been arraigned on a $1 million bail for ‘child molestation’ and further Google references to this individual had links to ‘teen sex sites’!

Now I know that Google can sometimes throw up unexpected and spurious results when you search on an individual’s name, but this was shocking!

Is my blog site being invaded by perverts and sex maniacs? Have I written anything which would attract these sorts of people? I reckon not and I reckon that, as usual when you search on an individual’s name in Google, or any other search engine for that matter, you are likely to come up with multiple occurrences of the name you’re looking for, and not all of them will be fine upstanding citizens.

Before my blog started and I shot to the top of Google search results when my name is typed in, there were some real weirdos out there with the same name as me and I dread to think what somebody might have thought had they searched for ‘Tom Cupples’ and seen the results come up.

Hopefully, now, if they do a search and are directed to my blog site, they’ll know I’m a fine chap, with a fine family and a fine woman in tow. Well - that's what my wife told me I could say!