A lyrical plan

Nov 05 2005

One of the less-obvious things I added to this site for its recent reboot was a random song lyric tagline on the homepage. I wanted something that was interesting and kinda cool, but that didn’t require me to expend much mental energy to come up with.

I also thought it would be pretty funny if my site started showing up in search results for random song lyrics; that, or I might even gain some new readers wondering why lines from their favourite songs were returning my site in amongst all the popup-laden lyric listings sites.

Result!

Counting Crows album cover

It didn’t take very long to happen; a mere three days after launch, and I am now result number one for the random lyric Round here we always stand up straight (from ‘Round Here’ on August and Everything After, Counting Crows). Pretty good going – I certainly wasn’t expecting to trump the other 3,000 sites featuring that line!

I’m also #8 for a Yahoo! search for These are the days of miracle and wonder (‘Boy in the Bubble’, Graceland, Paul Simon).

How’s it done?

I can’t take credit for anything apart from the idea, as it is made possible by a couple of existing Textpattern plugins:

To implement the page title, all I had to do was include a call to the dru_random_text plugin in the correct place on my template (while avoiding displaying it on pages of search results or category lists):

  1. <title>
  2. <txp:page_title />
  3. <txp:if_search>
  4. <txp:else />
  5. <txp:if_category>
  6. <txp:else /> &#0183; <txp:dru_random_text table="thewatchmakerproject_txp_lyrics" column="lyric" source="database" />
  7. </txp:if_category>
  8. </txp:if_search>
  9. </title>
  10. Download this code: /code/a-lyrical-plan.txt

Over time, as Google and the other search engines re-index the site and I add more lyrics to the database, I’ll hopefully start to show up in more searches; okay, it might dilute the relevance of those results if you’re a SERPs Nazi, but it keeps me amused…

Filed under: The Site, Textpattern.

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Previously: Rebooted

Next: Unscientific poll: Do you use the <base /> element?


Comments

Derek Featherstone
1065 days ago
I’ll be curious to see how this pans out – the Google results you point to show the lyric is in the title. And, if you are changing the title every time, well… I guess i’m just curuious to see what Google things of all of this. Clearly it worked, but I’m interested to see any long term effects…
#1
Matthew Pennell
1065 days ago
I can’t imagine that Google would have much of a problem with a site that changes its homepage title regularly – it can’t be that uncommon a scenario; look at online news outlets, they have the date in theirs.

I’ll probably forget to check next time I get spidered anyway… :D
#2
Derek Featherstone
1065 days ago
I guess I wasn’t thinking so much about the title, as I was the random phrase in the title that has nothing to do with the page, per se. Either way, we’ll see what happens.

I still like the idea… :)
#3
Matthew Pennell
1065 days ago
Oh, right – still not an uncommon scenario though, Google can’t realistically penalise sites for having irrelevant straplines, can they?
#4
Matthew Pennell
1065 days ago
...and PS – I couldn’t see where to purchase my box of chocolates on your site; can I get a refund from my Google search results?

;)
#5
Derek Featherstone
1065 days ago
I suppose not so uncommon… :)

I guess any of us that uses some kind of “conceptual” name for our blogs is doing the same thing – your site included. For that matter, do any of us have really accurate titles for the main page of our blog?
#6
Matthew Pennell
1064 days ago
There are probably one or two out there…
#7
Jehiah
1064 days ago
Hmmm yeah, I can’t think of anythig more acurate to call my blog ;-)
#8