"If you're talkin' about pre-teen sex you're talkin' 'bout Black Funk Rex"
In the early days of Smash Flops, in the mid-'90s, I discovered that the site (then hosted on my business server at rwt.co.uk) was experiencing
a disproportionate number of hits to the 'Black Funk Rex' lyrics page. This page was showing up in the server's log file perhaps 100 times more frequently
than all the other pages on my site put together. Was I doing something right? Checking the referrers and IP addresses of the visitors, I saw they were all
from search engine results, and with a global distribution, and what's more they didn't stick around to explore other parts of the site.
Evidently these visitors were expecting something we weren't offering! Phrases such as 'pre-teen sex' were attracting clients with no interest whatsoever in my
digital radio and TV tuners, nor indeed in Clive James' humorous song lyric poking fun at the wilder excesses of the heavy metal / glam-rock brigade of the 1970s.
In those days, search engine crawls of low-traffic sites were less frequent than they are today, and any remedy based on simply blocking 'robots'
from scanning the page would take a while to trickle through. So I also changed the page address of the lyric, and created a new page at the old address
explaining what we weren't, and requesting legitimate visitors to click a link which took them to the actual lyric.
No dice. The hungry midnight hunters were clicking straight through onto the lyric page without bothering to read the message. So I changed the redirection page
to make the on-screen link point invisibly to a warning page at FBI.com, while requiring the Atkin/James fans to enter the true address manually. Peace at last!
Stephen J Birkill (Webmaster, Smash Flops), August 2016