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.
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.
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!