A Year on the Wagon: Who the Hell Are You People?

Anyone who’s started an ambitious blog quickly becomes obsessed with SEO, search terms, and statistics: who’s reading, and when, and how often, and how did they find the site in the first place? For us, the past year has been no different, although with nearly 6.2 billion unique visitors a month, we’ve had to do some serious number-crunching. And after all the Ph.D.’s have been put to bed, and the supercomputers powered down, we’ve been left with one final question:

Oh my god, what kind of monsters are you fucking people?

I ask this based on a typical day of scanning the search terms that brought readers to Dadwagon. Oh, most of them are quite normal, the kinds of things that should ideally lead to a parenting blog:

Every once in a while, someone searches for a lengthy quote from “The Road,” by Cormac McCarthy, and comes up with my Q&A. Often, people search for subjects of our stories—Bambu, the Filipino rapper, or Jennifer Senior. And many are searches for us ‘wagoneers specifically, people trying to find out more about Theodore Ross, Nathan Thornburgh, Christopher Bonanos, and Matt Gross. That’s almost kind of nice, except when the search is for “Matt is a douche wagon.”

But a lot of them—I’m tempted to say most of them—are, um, well, different:

It’s hard to know how to feel when someone searching for “Hot sexy maids” lands on your Website about trying to get your kid into “universal” pre-K. On the one hand, I’m happy to divert the incest-seekers from gratifying their dubious desires, if only for a moment. And it doesn’t hurt that people Googling “sexy maid” have landed on Dadwagon a total of 54 times (and earning us zillions of zlotys!). On the other hand, do I really want Dadwagon to come up in a “dads licking kids” search? (Still, “filth raunch blog” I understand.)

Of course, there’s nothing we can really do about this. The Internet, after all, runs on porn. (You know about Rule 34, right?) And, you know, sometimes what seems like a disgusting perversion is really just curiosity.

Which brings me to “bibby bang,” the all-time no. 4 search term on Dadwagon. (Nos. 1 and 2 are “dadwagon” and “dad wagon”; no. 3 is “Genitals,” which as far as I can tell doesn’t produce search results that even lead here. Go figure.) Dadwagon is, in fact, the very first (and second!) result when you Google “bibby bang,” and in a neat twist, the first result is actually a story about how everyone is searching for “bibby bang.” (“Linkbait,” Theodore would call it.) It’s all very meta, and I’m quite happy about it, because it keeps random strangers coming back to Dadwagon, and earning us ever more zlotys, shekels, and rupiahs.

Wait, you still don’t know what “bibby bang” means? Try Googling it.

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About Matt

Matt Gross writes about travel and food for the New York Times, Saveur, Gourmet, and Afar, where he is a Contributing Writer. When he’s not on the road, he’s with his wife, Jean, and daughter, Sasha, in Boerum Hill, Brooklyn.

10 thoughts on “A Year on the Wagon: Who the Hell Are You People?

  1. I just Googled “Is there any way to unsee something you’ve just seen” and Dadwagon wasn’t returned. I’ll check again after I post this.

    Holy mother of god that last search string is unsettling. Can you tell if it was submitted by someone from New Jersey?

  2. Also, I would contend that the August 2, 2010: 11:12:58 search is emotionally uplifting and even a little bit classy if the second-to-last word was meant to be “likes” rather than “licks”.

  3. @Tim: That’s exactly how I first read it, and how I lik to believe it was intended. Also, according to Caribbean Ragazza, I’m required to direct all hate to Long Island instead of New Jersey. And I always do exactly what my readers tell me.

  4. w00t! Total SEO domination — this post is now the #1 result for “is there any way to unsee something you’ve just seen”. You’re welcome.

  5. Watch out, Dooce! DadWagon got SE-optimized by Tim. Now put us in the top five results for ‘titties’ and we’d really have an Internet business here.

  6. I fear writing a response in case I am one day implicated in reading such a seedy, dad-centered blog. *Shudder.* Too late, been there, done that.

    But, let us pause for an OH. MY. GAWT.

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