Friday, September 30, 2005

Site stats fun, or Pranking bloggers

I can be a bit of a prankster. Whether my pranks are actually funny doesn't matter, because they are always funny to me. I don't go with the tried and the true very often, prefering to break new pranking ground. I think I have a fairly creative prank you can play on your favorite bloggers, and it is rather harmless. Here's the skinny.

Most bloggers I know get a kick out of strange searches that bring people to their site. The key here is to play off of that. For the purposes of my example, I am going to pick on The Crazy Rants of Samantha Burns. I went through Samantha's blog and picked out some funny words. The words I chose were Canadian beaver burns farts cars. I took those words and did a Google search for them (see here). When you chose an odd ensemble of words like this, the chances of your intended prank target coming high in the search are very good. In this case, Sam's site comes up 7th. Now click on the link so your search string is recorded by their site statistics.

From here you can go in several directions. You can regularly enter that search string into search engines and stealthily make your target think that there are a lot of freaks out there. Be willing to try new mixes of words to see if you can get them to mention one of your search hits at their site. Or you can post the search link (as I did above) and encourage your readers to click on it and then click on the prank target's site in the search. This will make them wonder what the hell made them the expert on your search term.

Caution: When posting your prank to involve your readers, two things will happen. You will quickly give your prank away, as your target may see your post on Technorati or TTLB. Second, you now have that search string in your blog, and if there are any freaks looking for those things, they will become all yours.

Give it a try. See if you can fool your favorite bloggers into mentioning your freakiest and most contrived search terms.

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