Every year I write a post that goes over my blog searches for the year. That is the searches that have led people to finding my blog as far as I can tell. It’s usually a funny little post that leaves me amused and baffled.
If you are interested, you can find the past years here:
- Stats I’ll Show You Mine If You Show Me Yours
- Stat of The Year!
- What Even is 2020 – My Year in Search Terms
You may have noticed that I’m a little late this year. What’s more, I’m not as giddy as usual. That’s because when I sat down to look over my searches for the year, I ended up a bit more uncomfortable than usual.
First, let’s get it out there. There have always always been hentai and pr0n searches that lead to my site regardless of the fact that I avoid leading tags and rarely discuss the subject. It’s still by far what generates the most interest on the internet and apparently in the anime community. I have occasionally thought of starting an ecchi/hentai blog and just watching the views roll in!
And I’ve largely made my peace with this. However, there was a new trend in 2021 that I’m confused about. The EXACT search term: chubby loli hentai was one of the most popular ones this year and when you factor in all the variations, like sexy chubby loli or the less tasteful iterations, it sort of trounces any other search term on my blog.
For my own peace of mind, I tried to do a little research and I believe most of these searches are leading to an old post I wrote called Anime is Turning Me Into A Chubby Chaser. It was a think piece about how different body types and silhouettes were slowly getting introduced into anime and how I thought it was a good thing. Basically, that variety in design leads to more interesting visuals and a better watching experience. There is no mention of hentai or loli anywhere in the post although one reader does use the word loli in the comments. That’s it.
Naturally, anyone searching the internet with the search term above and landing on my post is probably not amused. In fact, I figure they will browse through the pictures, realize this is not where they want to be and click right off. Hopefully, this will teach google’s algorithm to no longer suggest my post in those circumstances.
And if this was all there was to it, that would be fine. But it seems that this year, people only found my blog through searches of nude or naked characters, ecchi, hentai, sexy, hot or just disturbing niche fetishes. Aside from those searches, I have the ones that are simply the names of anime. Not really anything else.
Gone are the odd seemingly random word scrambles that I stared at in awe and tried to figure out. Gones are the more thoughtful searches that might have pointed to one of the posts I was really proud of and that could have been enjoyed by the reader. Heck, I don’t even have funny typos to tell you guys about.
And that makes me a little bummed out.
Now, I’m not sure how this came about. Is there something about my SEO that is putting me in a particular bracket or is it just that people were hornier last year? And I do realize that this post will be full of those words and likely lead to another spike in those specific searches but I’m hoping it won’t be enough to overshadow everything else.
The thing is, I don,t have enough information to figure this out on my own. I honestly don’t know how to make it more obvious to search engines that this blog is not dedicated to hentai. And I don,t even know if I have to. For those of you that have blogs, did your searches skew towards the sexy side in 2021? Cause if it’s the same for everybody, maybe that’s just what people were looking for and well, it says something about the effects of long-term lockdown but it might not have anything to do with my blog specifically.
On the other hand, if everyone else’s searches stayed the same or even showed an opposite trend, then I’m the one who’s doing something odd and I should try to figure out what.
I don’t think I’ve reviewed any particularly racy series this year. Of course, it could be older posts that are suddenly becoming more popular. Still, my site is rather bland compared to some of my contemporaries. I even censor my own swear words most of the time.
Or maybe I’m looking at the issue from the wrong side. Maybe it’s not that I’m attracting more sexy searches but rather that I’m no longer attracting the weird goofy searches and all that’s left are the sexy ones. That could be it. I have made an attempt at actual SEO putting in relevant and serious key phrases, trying to create decent meta descriptions and all that. I use to be much more carefree with these things and ironically, that may be what is weeding out the fun searches.
Have any of you noticed something similar on your blogs? And do you guys have any tips for getting those fun random searches back? I miss those. At the very least, I need to get the mullet searches back!
I had a lot of “loli harem sex,” “loli sex,” and just “anime sex,” so you’re certainly not alone there. Lots of love for lolis…
Given my “Sex Should Be More Prominent in Anime” post, it seems very ripe for people of that nature to take a gander, and for Google to oblige them.
Next year, you will have many more humorous search terms! I guarantee it!
Thank you Kapodaco! This is the est new years wish I got!
…I don’t have any horny search hits (aside from “Inosuke porn”, which only jumped out at me after I almost gave up looking for horny search terms – there is also “Inosuke pose”, so one of those terms could have been a typo, for all I know). Normally, my search terms are ones trying to find specific things like “Should I read My Hero Academia Vigilantes before the main series?” (<-edited for spelling and punctuation…and no, you should probably read the main series first) and "anime coward". This is probably because I don't talk a lot about horny topics.
Oh that’s awesome. I hope I can better tailor my search terms next year. I figure that’s a better reading experience as well.
Aw, Jeez, now I’M worried about how I stumbled onto your blog…no, wait, you found me first. *Searches for how Irina found him* 🤔
Mind you, I’m not sure now I even want to know where/how both of my readers found me…though, if I did, how would I do that, exactly??
I simply go through the serahc termsWP provides. It’s very incomplete but in past years, it was pretty funny.
I just did that…and, truth to tell, it was pretty tame. Search engines, mostly. WordPress reader. Facebook, Twitter, Insta…and a couple of referrals from you (which was the non boring bit).
You obviously attract a far more exotic crowd than I do… 🤔
Those are your referers. Your search terms are a bit lower down
Oh! Ha – they were even lamer! 🤣
I hadn’t checked for a long time, but apparently some of my most popular search terms include “goku naked pees”, “anime yuri sex”, and “anime breasts”. *shrugs* I don’t really care, to me it’s more funny than anything else. I currently work for an online magazine where seo is almost the be-all and end-all of the site, so god forbid I take it as seriously on a blog that I have just for fun and to stay connected with like-minded folks.
I agree with you. I’m not sure how like minded I am to the folks looking for chubby lollis but beggars can’t be choosers…
a lot of searches show up as unknown search terms which is unfortunate because I do like seeing how people find my blog. I’m not a fan of advertising so I don’t really do so. I do have some funny ones:
“The guy above Akainu” leading to a post about Akainu (I mean, it probably did answer the person’s question)
“Mushoku Tensei Ecchi scene” I wrote about how problematic that show is and it’s by far my most popular post. People like controversy I suppose.
“Is Eden’s Zero Fairy Tail?” This might be my favorite because it’s both super dumb and makes perfect sense.
but to answer your question, I haven’t been blogging long enough to see a shift, but within what I see is nothing particularly outlandish.
Most of my searches are unknown as well…
Is Enden Zero Fairy Tail is a question I can see a lot of people asking. I like it
since I am on the free wordpress plan, I don’t get notified what searches lead to my site. I just know that I get so many from search engine X and that’s about it. Probably just as well, as I’d end up doing exactly what you are, ie, worrying about it 🙂
I’m also on the free plan! It’s a small box on the stats page, on the left and just below the Posts and Pages stats box. A lot of the searches I get are ‘unknown’, but some weird ones still slip through. You can read more about why they might come up as unknown here: https://wordpress.com/support/stats/#search-engine-terms
Thanks Melancholy. One more area to investigate!
I think you see them the same. At least there was no change for me.
I just read Melancholia’s comment. Learning soemthing new every week 🙂
Cool!
I’ve got a few that are clearly ecchi related and quite clearly they aren’t going to find what they are looking for in my blog. But the majority of the searches are pretty mundane looking for things like the Deca-Dence bugs or similar.
My favourite search and I have no idea what they were looking for or which page they landed on was ‘anime sister works as maid brother gets killed’. It seems weirdly specific and yet I have no idea.
Oh that is a nice term. Very intriguing. i really want to know what they were looking for!
I use Yoast, but I don’t think of it in terms of using SEO. I try to focus on getting my stuff in front of readers who want to read it. It should be the same thing, but I’ve read some folks use SEO for for click volume, and that isn’t what I’m going for.
I think that might explain why my #1 and #2 search terms for all of 2021 was “dr stone season 2 episode 1” and “dr.stone season 2 episode 1”. I took me a second to realize the only difference was the period after the first “dr”.
I was feeling pretty good about my queries at this point! The most numerous ones matched what I was trying to do with Yoast.
Then I found “my dress up darling bikini”. Okay, that’s not so bad. But the farther down the list I went, the more suggestive it became. I found a couple more like “anime girl gets “. There were some that seemed to favor particular parts of the bodies of the female characters in Taboo Tattoo. And wow, someone really inappropriately liked Kurumi’s inappropriate medical scenes in Magical Girl Spec Ops!
Well. I can now answer your question “Have any of you noticed something similar on your blogs?” with a “Yes!” I guess the good news is that by and large, using Yoast to help me feature the series title and episode number has helped a lot. In fact, those account for my top 50 or 100 search queries. I hope that helps at least a little!
I also have the exact term: “my dress up darling bikini”. But that’s obviously for 2022. I looked it up and I’m happy to see that 2022 is already way more insteresting than 2021.
I’m surprised you don’t get more thrity searches. I mean just through the number of views you get it would be normal that a percentage of those are looking for something more racy.
I just looked at my search terms for the past year, and the only thing that even came close to a search for adult content was “my hero academia adult manga.” I was actually surprised by that, because I would have thought I would have seen more than one over the past year. I’m sure if I looked at my all-time search terms that I would find more,,,
That’s actually super impressive. I always had a lot of “mature” searches but last year was just exceptional.
Aww, no. Those were such fun every year.
Might be lockdown fatigue? I’m noticing at work that people are getting more and more… strange.
On the upside, I just looked at my 2022 searches and they are already better! I have the mysterious: shoujo and the black alley, which could also be hentai for al I know but I really like this search term. Most importantly I have: anime mullet hairstyle!! Thank you to whoever searched that. I didn’t get a single mullet search last year!
Yay! Looking forward to next year.
Ever since I reviewed the One Piece Amazon Lilly Arc a couple of years ago I get a couple of South American hits every day of people searching “Amazon Lilly free episode downloads” and the like, despite at no point in my review to I mention these things. It’s just “One Piece” and “Amazon Lilly” that ironically directs wannabe pirates to my site, no doubt to their disappointment!
Oh yeah. I do get a lot of people looking for episodes to download. That has pretty much always been the case. That must get frustrating for them
I don’t bother with using SEO tools to optimize my search results or any of that, so I can’t say if that would make a difference here. But I’ve always noticed I get a lot of hits from people looking for hentai or at least something related to it. A lot of hits on my Nekopara post from that, and also from people searching for rule 34 based on anime and games I’ve written about many of which don’t have anything racy in them at all. Not unexpected, but I’m also sorry they didn’t find what they were looking for on my site.
As for that particular l-word, I’ve avoided ever using it for just this reason, that I didn’t want to get up in the Google results for it, but apparently you don’t even need to use the term to get the traffic! Though I know there is debate about one game series I’ve looked at, but it’s all way overblown in my opinion. Sorry to hear about these weird search results you’re seeing; wish I had more insight to give.
It’s o.k. Like I said, there was always tons of horny searches, I hope I gey the weird ones back some day!
I’m afraid I have nothing to contribute. I have tried lots to get my numbers up. I tried diversifying my content, finding what works, and sticking to what gets people’s attention, and I’m still low. It certainly doesn’t help that we now live in an age of Cancel Culture, Puritan Culture, and basically have Social Media shadow ban you if you are on the wrong side of history. Whatever. The only wrong side of history to me is the side your standing on when the giant pile of history books falls over. Did they hit you? Wrong side. Your supposed to be on the side away from the falling pile of historical books that may have been tampered with.
Also doesn’t help when new social media platforms, like Amino, puts more emphasis on money and selling you useless tokens to give each other Reddit style, than building a quality platform to promote yourself on and reach your audience. Honestly I’m beginning to think you need to be adopted by a famous YouTube’s to get noticed, and I don’t wanna be adopted by Caddicarus… Yeah yeah he’s not in my review circles, but I watch him.
So with my long rant telling you I’m useless over? I will just say I never worry about search results. I worry about picking the yearly content I review that I hope will improve my search results. Heck. I’m dying sooner or later. Why worsen my already bad disposition. Best wishes and hope you get better search results this year.
It’s a good idea not to worry. I miss my fun ones. I really had some crazy search terms. They made my day!
One thing I have learnt much recently; try not having your categories and tags the same eg category is books, tags have books in it, change one of them. Apparently on a website I read, it confuses the search engines, as they struggle to prioritise what to search for. I’ve recently cleared up my tags and categories on my posts, whilst low, it has helped. Key is being consistent with those tags.
Huh! That is very interesting. I’ll try that out!
Here’s the website Irina, check it out when you can https://www.hostinger.com/tutorials/wordpress-tags
Thank you!
As someone who used to work in marketing (2 years ago, but I keep up with trends since I’m out of work), I can promise you that even the least horny blogs regularly get bizarrely horny searches. My blog is pretty tiny and I don’t post that often, but I feel like I used to get hornier search criteria before I made a post about how periods are represented in anime. Now, it seems like almost all of my searchers are asking things about that; some of them horny, some just curious. It seems to overriding everything else about my blog because it’s pulling the most searches.
One thing that bothers me is how some of my referrals seem to be coming from aggressively horny sites that mostly just share porn? It’s probably because I wrote one post about absolutely hating a certain incestuous show, but still :’/ The thing about those referral sites that bothers me, however, is that one of the ways Google reads your site is through other sites referring to it (see ‘Domain Authority’ stuff). So, if a number of porn sites are referring users to my site, it might be telling Google that my site has things that pr0n searchers are looking for… and then it snowballs…
Best thing you can do is to keep up with the metadata and keywords. Hopefully, you’ll hit on a trend this year which spawns some interesting variations on long tail keywords? Alternately, trying to get some authority from reputable non-horny spaces might help to thin it out? Marketing often feels like crossing your fingers and jumping into the dark, so best of luck!
My most popular searches are funko pop DIY and…two books quite racy from two romance authors! So I guess sex is indeed selling this year!