One of the interesting things about owning a blog or other web site is seeing how people find your site.  Most sites get at least a third of their traffic from search engines, and tools like Google Analytics let you see what keywords people used to find your site.  So now and then I go through that keywords list to see if there are particular topics that get a lot of searches, that I should write more about—or just for curiosity’s sake.  Sometimes I find funny stuff, and sometimes I’m just puzzled.

As of today, the keyword that’s sent me the most visitors over the past 30 days is “future pluperfect.”   Eight different people have typed “future pluperfect” into Google and found my site that way.  At the moment, my 12th Latin lesson ranks #10 for that term.

There’s only one problem: there’s no such thing as a future pluperfect tense.  That lesson is about the pluperfect and future perfect tenses, so those two words are both on the page, but “future pluperfect” doesn’t exist.  (At least not in Latin.)  It seems odd that that many people would be looking for a tense that doesn’t exist.  I don’t have a bunch of searches for the “past present” or “present imperfect” tenses; just this one strange one.

So I searched for it on Google myself, and there at #9, right above my listing, was a link to an X-Men fan fiction series called Future Pluperfect.  I’d bet a dollar that’s what those eight people were looking for, and that explains why all but one of them bounced immediately.  I hope they weren’t too disappointed with my Latin lesson.

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My new affiliate marketing article that I wrote about yesterday is already indexed on Google today, but at #19.  It won’t sell much down there, so I’ll watch it and see if it climbs up as Google finds the links I created to it, or whether I need to make more.