Search Engine Consequences of Characters' Names

How my web pages and blogs appear on on search engine results never ceases to amaze me.  In short, be careful of the names you apply to your characters.  My web denseness has tangled me in a strange Google results.  Fortunately the spider's web hasn't caught this blog yet.  I've landed myself in interesting web territory two times now.

First was labeling my characters "half-elven".  When I started writing about the half-elven of the Far Isles ... I knew J. R. R. Tolkien had popularized the concept.  For years, I had reread the Lord of the Rings trilogy yearly.  On the other hand, I knew there are many kinds of elves in European folklore ... and figured they could breed with humans as well as any other elves.

What I didn't know was the gaming community [eg. Dungeons and Dragons players] has also made a huge mental and web investment in the abilities and quirks of beings resulting from human/elf matings.  The prime pages of the Google results are filled with their web listings.  I'm happy to appear on the third page.  Maybe ... some day ... I'll get enough smarts and energy to play with my meta tags to get the Half-Elven home page higher.

More recently, I bounced my head against another search engine problem when I started working on my free story blog ... site ... whatever. A new phenomena reared its presence when I tracked the statistics for this site.  I had visits from a huge number of TinyUrls that linked back to porn sites.

Seems there's an extreme sex character [web presense?] by the name of Renna.  So, while Renna remains one of my characters, I've been changing the emphasis of the site. Until the search engines change, I'm sure I'm disappointing a lot of people.


Bottom line:  You might check the names of your characters before you put them on the web.