Straight Dope Dad | A Father's View on Parenting

Summary – If you have a parenting blog you will most likely attract a few pedophiles. Sad but true. Plus bonus tips on how to reduce your parenting blog’s attractiveness to pedophiles.

There are unintended consequences to everything and blogging about fatherhood is no exception.

Now being a father with a daughter, I’m naturally going to use words like young, girl, child, kid and so on. But I also like to write about love, relationships, and sex. These subjects are about me and my partner. Adding to the mix is my use of salty language. I’m not shy about using the occasional fuck to make my point.

Taken in context these terms have clear purpose and are not easily confused with other meanings or interpretation. That is unless you are not a human being and instead a robot.

Search engines send out “bots” and “crawlers” to scan the text and code on your website. They collect this data and send it back where its is cataloged on thousands of servers. This is called indexing. Google has tens of thousands of servers spread across the world that enable it to return near instantaneous results to your search queries.

Now Google’s algorithm is incredibly sophisticated from a mathematical perspective but very primitive from a human perspective. It can’t understand irony or a good joke. It has no idea that a single web page may have three distinct essays on it that have nothing in common with each other. It doesn’t understand context or when you’re using metaphor or hyperbole. Basically, it’s a simple number cruncher.

Now, for everyday purposes this is plenty good for helping you find what you want. The market has anointed Google the clear winner on relevancy by capturing (judging from my own statistics) at least 90% of the search market.

So this is how it all works and most of the time it works well. But because Google is basically a number cruncher it lumps all my words and sentences together. This content lumping leads a few people, who are searching for some very disturbing subjects, to visiting my site. Below is a collection, in no particular order, of the fifty creepiest search terms from November 2009 to November 2010.

Now could some of these be academic/investigative research or normal curiosity? Yes. I know I’ve searched for some pretty fucked up stuff over the years. But some of these could not possibly fit in that category. Some of these are without a doubt searches by men who have a very unhealthy sexual attraction to children. Some may actually be currently molesting children at this very moment.

Now this is not my fault of course. It’s Google’s. But not really Google’s either as they can’t understand context nor control how people search.

Fortunately these people don’t hang out on my blog. In web analytics there is a term called bounce rate. If someone comes to your site and then backs out without visiting any other pages, that person would have a 100% bounce rate. Nearly all of these visitors had a 100% bounce rate which means my blog didn’t match what they were really looking for. Whew!

So I’m not going to change my writing style over this as it would defeat the whole purpose of writing personal blog as well as be pointless exercise as there is no way to predict how it will all come out in the end. Plus, my daughter is in no real danger. These are just lonely messed up guys with bad spelling trying to satisfy their needs through digital gratification.

So should I stress out even more about what photos I choose to show? I’m already pretty strict. A totally innocent picture of my daughter could be a turn-on for a molester. I can’t help that. Just as a women’s shoe catalog can be a masturbatory aid for a man who has a foot fetish, so can a parenting blog be a source of titillation for a person who’s sexually attracted to children.

So what’s a turn-on for a pedophile? Besides the obvious stuff that shows some skin, I have no idea. I also assume it’s as varied as normal adult sexual attraction is. I wish I could change how some people think, but I can’t. How any one person is going to interpret what I post is mostly out of my control. That’s just how it is.

Plus they also clog up my visitor stats with irrelevant data which probably bugs me even more than the predator stuff. Lay off my analytics assholes!

Here’s Three Simple Rules That Will Greatly Reduce Your Parenting Blog’s Attractiveness to Pedophiles. (I don’t personally follow these rules but as an SEO expert and web developer with over ten years experience I guarantee they will work.)

1. Use deceptive or anonymous file names for your images. A picture of your infant daughter taking a bath should be something like “image-0001.jpg” or “box.jpg” not “my-daughter-taking-bath.jpg”.

2. Use deceptive alt tags/image descriptions when inserting images into posts. A picture of your infant daughter taking a bath should be something like “a plain brown box” or “carton of eggs”.

3. Don’t use words like sex, fuck, fucking, nude, naked, shit,and shitting anywhere on your blog.

If you want to see who’s visiting your blog then install Google Analytics.
It’s free.

How to Install Google Analytics
If you want to install Google analytics on your blog then sign up for an account here. Then, if you have a WordPress blog, install the Google Analyticator Plugin by searching for new plugins in your admin panel then click install now. Just insert your Google account profile ( it will look something like this: UA-5555555-3) in the proper field and you’re done.

File Under: How to Stop Pedophiles from Visiting Your Parenting Blog, Mom Blog, Mommy Blog, Dad Blog, or Father Blog – How Search Engines Index Your Blog