Search Keyword not in my website?

[Early Out]

I seem to recall an explanation of this in here before, but can't find it. When I look at my awstats, it shows the Search Keyphrases and Search Keywords that were used by a search engine to locate my site. There are some puzzling entries in there, like "buick" and "zyban," words that don't appear in my site anywhere. How could a search for one of those words lead a search engine to my site?

[charlesgan]

factor that affecting search result at google is...
1. your page content
2. which incoming refering to your website. (anchor text).

the number 2 is the reason. if you have many link with anchor 'allien attack' then likely your page will appear when people search for that phrase.

[Sonny]

I've been getting the same thing. Words like "alprazolam", "vicodin" and simply "105". Makes no sense considering the site is about handcrafted wood products. Also, my latest visitors stats have all but gone away lately. Anyone else?

[Early Out]

Periodically, the "latest visitor" stats do seem to vanish. I've never figured out why.

I've never paid a lot of attention to the search engine optimization games, so I don't understand why the owner of a vicodin-peddling website would create anchor text ("vicodin") pointing to my website. I don't understand how that would benefit him in any way, but it must, or they wouldn't bother.

I'd love to have someone explain it, in terms an ordinary person can understand!

[charlesgan]

a scenario that i like to bring forward here.
about one of my weblog. which was still new when this happened.

its somehow being attention of spammer.
then taken content from my rss feed. and replicate lots of links at their spam network.

so when i check this site for appearing in how many sites,
ooo..ooo... its a very huge networks of theirs..
some are .jp domain with japanese content.

so unintentionally, the site being linked back. (seo advantage).
but with watever content/recontruction at the spammer side.

so, everything got mixed up very badly.

[Pethens]

On the one hand, it can be perfectly legitimate for someone to find your page by using a search term that doesn't appear anywhere on your page. Search engines use a technique called "latent semantic analysis" to identify words that are similar or closely related so that they can return relevant results when the page author and the searcher have different ideas about what terms should be used. So, for example, I have an article about FFmpeg and I get Google queries all the time from people looking for Mencoder, even though I never use that word. Google knows they are related.

On the other hand, sometimes you get searches that are clearly not relevant to your page. Typically some high-volume keyword is involved. This happens often for me with live.com, often with terms I'd rather not be associated with. I think this is related to some kind of spamming. Unfortunately, you can't stop people from linking to you. I'd like to know more about exactly what is going on, but I haven't been able to figure it out.