#oneaday Day 37: Giving the People What They Want

Inspired by Irina over at I Drink and Watch Anime, I thought it high time I took a look at the search terms that are bringing people to MoeGamer.

At least, that was the plan. Turns out that the search results bringing people to the site are all rather boring (albeit thankfully to the point and relevant to what I write!), and there aren't even any funny or awkward questions in there to share. Shame. I used to get some real crackers on my old personal blog, but that was because I wrote about any old bullshit day after day (much like I'm doing here, in fact, funny that), and thus I would get a selection of results that can be best described as "eclectic", ranging from "why teaching sucks" to "monster cock". 42 people found my old blog by searching for "erect penis". Good work.

The whole "optimising for search engines" thing kind of annoys me these days, because it's so flagrantly transparent when sites do it. Imagine there's a TV show you want to watch — let's say, I don't know, Game of Thrones or something. You don't know what time it's airing and you don't have any streaming services, so you head to Google and type in something like "what time is Game of Thrones on?" Before you get any information direct from the source, there will be approximately 76 pages of tabloid-style garbage all with the headline "What time is Game of Thrones on? What channel does Game of Thrones air on? How can I watch Game of Thrones? Everything you need to know about Game of Thrones tonight. Game of Thrones." And I don't click on any of them when that happens.

This is also why video game sites publish "guide content" these days (with very similar "question" headlines), and why bigger sites like IGN have "wikis" set up for every game in their database. I say "set up"; they have a blank page ready to be filled in for everything in their database, but so far as Google is concerned, that counts as a relevant page about the game in question — so if you're looking for information on a semi-obscure title, good luck trawling through all these empty pages before you actually find any helpful information.

This is also why video game sites publish "reviews in progress" of big games on release day. They need to get a page up that has /call-of-duty-review/ in its URL, even if they haven't finished (or indeed played) the game. It's part of clickbait… and once again, I don't click on it.

I'm not sure at what point I became so cynical about commercial online content, but given the existence of numerous "Saved You a Click" Twitter accounts, it seems I am not the only one. And all this is why you will only ever see simple and clear headlines on MoeGamer that — hopefully at least — give you a good idea of what it is you are about to read. (Patreon teasers are another matter, mind you. You'll hopefully forgive me for that at least.)