One of the cool things that happened when the Shore Leave site moved to the new hosting company (aside from having things work correctly) was that now we can get statistics on how often the site is visited, what pages people visit, and other stuff like that.
One of the newly available items is a list of the search terms people were using when they clicked a link that brought them to our site. For the past several months, I’ve been amused to see that “Black Death” is, by a large margin, the single most common search term bringing people to Shore Leave. For the month of March, “Black Death” accounted for more than 37% of the traffic coming from search sites, and until recently, we had no idea why.
I had an idea a week or so back and instead of the usual “Causing Mischief” type of idea, this was one of those, “Trying to solve a mystery” ideas.
If you do a normal search on Google, Yahoo, or whatever and just look for “Black Death”, you get back several bazillion results, most referring to the bubonic plague. I’m sure we’re in there somewhere, but it’s nowhere obvious.
But if you use the exact same words for a Google image search… One of the photos from the Shore Leave site – labeled “Black Death” – is in the top dozen!
I don’t think we need to “fix” anything, after all, this means people are finding our site. We just need to make sure that nobody tells Amanda Tapping a guy dressed as the Grim Reaper is 250 times more popular than she is!!!