One of the pleasures of running a website is seeing how visitors stumble upon it. Thanks to the wonders of javascript, when somebody clicks on some other website’s link to Yankee Fog, I can see the name of the referring website. If that website is a search engine, I can even see the search terms that led them to me.

In the first few weeks Yankee Fog was online, I was receiving about 5 visits a day, mostly from folks who found the site listed on Yahoo. Hoping to get a little more traffic, I filled out the “Take a look at my site” link at BoingBoing, one of the more popular guides to cool things on the Internet. Boingboing put Yankee Fog on its front page Within two days, I had 2000 additional hits.
Soon after, traffic levels had dropped, but the link from BoingBoing had brought me to the attention of other websites, who also started linking to me. Since then, I’ve been getting from 30-50 hits a day.
Of the visitors who find Yankee Fog via a search engine, most of them seem to be doing chocolate-related searches of some sort. Searches for “Chocolatier Van Oost,” “pralinette,” “chocolaterie sukerbuyc” and “Moeder Babelutte” have brought my fellow cocoa-bean addicts to Truffle In Paradise. Indeed, for one brief, glorious moment, typing “sites that sell toblerone” into Google, and then clicking on “I’m feeling lucky” would bring you straight to Yankee Fog. Although I do not actually sell Toblerone here, I do have one page that is just chock full of the words “sell” and “Toblerone.” Sadly, Google seems to have wised up; my Google ranking for that particular search phrase has since dropped 92 places.
Worse still, I have fallen from the glorious heights of Cheekidom. In February, if you googled the phrase “Cheeky Girls touch my bum video,” this essay of mine was the number one result, and the Cheeky Girls’ own website was merely number two. Now those accursed Cheeky ones have somehow regained the top spots, and I am a lowly #300.
(By the way: Google, I would never dream of interering with your ranking procedures, but allow me to say, “Toblerone. Toblerone. Toblerone. Toblerone. Cheeky Girls; Cheeky Girls–Cheeky Girls. Touch my bum. Touch my bum? Touch my bum.” Thank you for your attention.)
It’s not just English speakers who have found Yankee Fog; at least one Frenchman has used Google’s translation feature to read Truffle Dans Le Paradis, which can be found on the classy-sounding webpage “Broullard De Yankee”. Dutch, Swiss, German, and Portugeuse googlers have all come here looking for–you guessed it– “Toblerone.”
All that has become fairly predictable. But when I look at my referrals, what I’m really hoping to see are the anamolies. For example, consider the mystery man who did a search for “London poetry Tooting.” Was he looking specifically for On The Poetry Of London Place Names, or is there some vast canon of Tooting Bec-related verse to which I am but a minor contributor?
Then there is the poor sap who, after doing a search for “Japanese dominatrix in London,” ended up here; something tells me that’s not what he had in mind. I have even more pity on the anonymous googler who, hungover though he may have been, managed to search for “how to stop bloodshot eyes,” only to end up reading an essay with no practical advice.
My absolute favorite searches, though, are the utterly inexplicable ones. Did the person who googled “psychoactive durian” know something I don’t?
And when a visitor arrived via a search for “dominatrix marzipan,” what did he hope to find?
As time has gone by, more and more visits to Yankee Fog have come from “unknown” sources. Presumably, these are people who have bookmarked the site, or who have typed the address directly into their web browsers, or who were referred by an e-mail instead of a website.
I’m delighted at this evidence of a slowly growing loyal readership, but even so, it leaves me wondering: where are you people coming from? That’s not a rhetorical question; I hope you’ll treat it as an invitation to click on the “comment” link below, and leave me a short note letting me know who you are and how you found Yankee Fog. After all, as Benjamin Franklin once said, “The writer who does not know his audience will never Toblerone Toblerone Toblerone Cheeky Girls.”