Ted and I have noticed in the Awstats web log analysis software that there are two words that bring more people to mac.fiveforks.com by far than any other words. While phrases like “unlock itunes” or “estonian girls” or “harry potter and the half blooded prince” are popular reasons people end up here, they pale in comparison to either of these two words:

trolls
barbies

In October, 252 visitors arrived from search engines looking for “trolls” while 227 visitors arrived because of “barbies”. We quickly figured out it had to do with the story of the Nekid Barbies and Trolls posted with a pretty funny photo. We figured the photo had something to do with it. Or maybe the word “nekid”. But we could not find this blog posting ranking very high in the search engines. Why were so many people finding the posting?

Today Ted figured it out. If you go to www.yahoo.com and click on the “images” tab, you can search for photos. You can type in either the word “trolls” or “barbies” and guess what photo has the #1 position!

I can only imagine that clicking on thumbnails in a Yahoo images search somehow moves a photo up in rank. If a lot of people click on it, then it must be what people are looking for, so move it up. Because our thumbnail (a row of flesh-colored nekid barbies with a troll) is unusual, it must have gotten a lot of clicks over time. It is now #1 and getting even more clicks because of that.

This is called an asset ready to be exploited.

Why has this article not generated more ad revenue? It turns out the link on Yahoo is to an old archive version (using the path and file name /archives/000709.html) instead of the newer archive structure (2004/05/nekid_barbies_a.html.) The older article did not have google ads, and it did not even display correctly because it was in the old template structure that did not work very well with the new css styles.

I’ve now replaced the 000709.html file with a nice new clean copy and added an extra google ad at the top. The money should start rolling in shortly. We could build a barbies / trolls empire off of this thing. Kathy is already checking eBay, looking for a wholesaler of troll dolls.