I have an ongoing theme of wonder and puzzlement concerning my search engine ranking. You can look here for a previous post on this. I don't spend any effort to speak of finagling or finessing my ranking yet I often find my posts near the top of some searches that surprise me.

The example at the moment: a Google search on "i blame the patriarchy" (no quotes) listed a post of mine as number six out of 374,000 hits. My ranking is even higher when you consider that the first two positions are the I Blame the Patriarchy site itself and two others are from the same site, Creek Running North. This puts my hit effectively at number four.

Now, I Blame the Patriarchy is a great blog but I can't believe my comments are that important nor the first to give prominent shout outs to it. So what is the weighting process?

The question is: How the hell do I rank like this? This blog is a relatively quiet corner of blogland. The number of hits to my blog (according to my counters) is still under 5,000 in over a year. Mind you, I'm not complaining but I remain confused. And this example isn't even the most bizarre. Truly, the internets are strange.

[Addendum: In related news, I've cut down on the number of rotating title graphics at the top of the blog from 32 to 22. I don't know what possessed me to put so many up. I'll be whittling them down more in the future. Through a slight file name glitch, a graphic with the strangest search phrase to lead to my blog wasn't appearing. The search phrase was "lies of the devil rape dominance fear stuttering." If you've come across a stranger search string that actually led to your website or blog, please, please leave a comment and tell me. It's creeping me out. But obviously not so much that I won't exploit it. I like weird.]