Allison Stokke? | Hacker News Reader

Allison Stokke?

whattofix.com

I feel bad for the girl.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/05...

Have to love WP referring to Facebook as "a social networking site intended mainly for college students."

That's what it used to be. You needed an .edu email address to sign up.

That was 2 years ago. I felt the same way back then. Matter of fact, her story was one of the inspirations for the original article.

Since then she has participated in things like Spike TV's sexiest athlete contest. She's also an adult, and she's not exactly hiding from the cameras.

If this were two years ago, I'd feel the same way. In fact, I did. But people and situations change.

I'm going to add this article to my bookmarks on web site monitization. It appears that a good way to attract traffic is to pattern a site after a British tabloid. Prominently display a gorgeous girl (even with her clothes on!), along with whatever might be of interest to the real target audience. Grab those eyeballs.

With over 500 articles, I've played around with format quite a bit. I enjoy doing creative and new things.

The problem is that the eyeballs you grab don't always monetize that much. You end up with this impedance mismatch. But maybe I'm wrong -- perhaps the PayPal link I added might actually work!

It's not just tabloid-related. It's much more along the lines of keyword density, which the article goes over. For instance, I wrote an article on Global Warming http://www.whattofix.com/blog/archives/2007/05/did_walt_disn... that had a picture of Walt Disney holding an early version of Micky Mouse. It was a lengthy article and I was trying to make a serious point.

If you google for pictures of Walt Disney, there's my blog up there at the top http://images.google.com/images?q=Walt%20Disney&oe=utf-8...

To this day I get 30-50 hits a day from people looking for pictures of Walt Disney. They read the article title (of course not the text!) and then make inane comments about global warming.

So the strategy might be good for bringing people to your site, but for what purpose?

I'm telling you, I should have gotten into porn.

I'm #14 for pictures of "Arnold". It's where most of my search traffic comes from despite having only one article and one picture of Arnold on one site. I wonder how I got so high for someone already famous?

By the way, I'm really interested in the answer to the question presented in the article -- why am I getting so many hits from Yahoo for searches of Allison Stokke?

I thought about posting it as an "Ask HN" article, but I figured it was better in a longer format. Plus I get to experiment with seeing if future searchers are actaully willing to pay ten bucks for more pictures!

This is very interesting, so I'm not sure why it is dead... I had a similar experience with people going to my site from "girls gone wild" searches. When I searched Google Images for "Girls Gone Wild" a picture from my site came up in the top 10 results. It turns out it was just a picture from a party I had attended where one girl was straddling the other in some kind of horse play -- the photo name was girls_gone_wild.jpg.

Now it's undead, apparently.

Zombie stories! Type as fast as you can!

Yahoo is generally easier to rank on for specific phrases that are fairly rare, fairly focused, and have fairly low search volume. B and C-list celeb names kind of sit in that sweet spot. Also specialized products.

Try searching "left-handed tomato peelers" on Google vs Yahoo: Yahoo's top results tend to be smaller niche stuff; Google has Amazon, BizRate and shopping.msn in the top 6.

All very interesting, but unfortunately the volume isn't really enough for a pure ad play.

I apologize for commenting so much, but there was a serious question here that I'm digging for an answer.

When I go to Yahoo and enter "Allison Stokke", I get bupkis hits from my blog (which is fine with me!) -- even in the images -- but yet Webalizer says that 90% of the hits are coming from there. Any ideas?

There is an SEO question at the bottom of this -- is there some other way to get hits from a search engine besides going to the page and looking at the results? It's outside of my depth. I was hoping somebody here would have the answer. I'll shut up now.

You can find the URLs they are coming from, which contains the specific phrase and page number by looking at the raw "referer" [sic] field in your logs.

Also, if you are getting this report solely from webserver logs it might be a false positive. Cross-check against Analytics or other javascript-based counter to make sure it's not bots. Microsoft has been spamming people's logs with fake "search traffic" for years.

Also, you have a handful of sites that are hotlinking to your images of this woman. It's possible that's passing PR. http://search.yahoo.com/search?p=%22Allison+Stokke%22+%2Bwha...

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