Lucky Sevens: How Did People Get to somnolescent.net in 2025?

Happy new year to all the faithful Letters readers out there! As dcb said in his closing out the year post, groups like ours don’t usually stick around this long, but as we go into eight years of humbly posting obscure shit for your edification, the lights are on bright as ever here.

I thought I’d start up a new year’s tradition this year (which, turns out, I did back in 2021 but I guess gave up on) by giving you a peek behind the curtain. While somnolescent.net doesn’t track you (not just for privacy reasons, more because we like lightweight pages and clean HTML), I do have a lot of data courtesy of Google and Bing about where our pages get linked out online and what search terms bring people to what pages. While “Five Neat Things From the Somnolescent Archives” and follow-up were meant to bring you what I think are some interesting draws to the site network, this one’s gonna be all about what actually draws people in.

An introduction to the Google Search Console

I’ve been tracking our Google stats for many years now through the Google Search Console. The gist is that you verify you own a site by putting a Google-supplied hash in your DNS records, and Google will then tell you about backlinks (where people are linking to your stuff), search terms that bring clicks and impressions (how many times your pages get seen in searches), what pages prove the most popular, and any indexing and performance issues Google notices. You can also deliver Google your sitemaps (XML lists of page URLs so Google knows about everything on each site) through the Search Console to make sure everything is indexed (listed on Google) correctly. Here’s Letters‘ sitemap index, if you’re curious.

(Brief aside, this has nothing to do with Google Analytics, which we don’t use anywhere on somnolescent.net as said. Analytics get embedded into pages themselves and tell us specific things about your browser and browsing habits. The Search Console simply tracks how traffic flows from Google and the broader Web into somnolescent.net. Once you’re in our house, ironically, we know less about you than before you came in.)

The Search Console is a pretty invaluable tool, and I’ve been making quiet improvements to the whole of the site network thanks to it the past year. Things like fixing broken links, setting canonicals (or how we tell Google what the True and Honest version of a page is, as opposed to the potential many duplicates on archives and elsewhere), more obscure bugs like DreamHost not sending error pages with their proper codes (PHP to the rescue once again!), so on and so forth. A lot of it, you’ll never see, but it makes me much happier to have a clean site network, especially given how big it already is.

I do have access to a Bing equivalent to the Google Search Console in Bing’s Webmaster Tools, and I’ll be showing off some of that in this post as well, but it’s a lot less useful to me. For one thing, the search listings are a lot spammier–queries like “fiveducks + squareup -site:facebook.com -site:instagram.com -site:youtube.com -site:tiktok.com” [etc] that are blatantly robots that Microsoft just doesn’t seem to give a shit about removing from my dataset. It also tries to boss me around with how our pages are built, saying I should increase title lengths and other jerkoff behavior like I actually give a shit about SEO. I’m curious how people are getting here, Microsoft. That’s all.

2025’s top Somnolescent searches

Onto the interesting stuff! In total this year, around 8,400 people clicked on a Somnolescent page in a Google search, and there were about 786,000 impressions. (I’m pretty disinterested in impressions because they’re effectively “failed clicks”–a crawler or a user saw the link, but didn’t click it. As such, top searches will be sorted by resulting clicks instead.) Our average CTR, or click-through rate, was around 1.1%, and our average search ranking was around spot 18, so on the second page.

I don’t consider any of this good or bad, to be clear. As I said in the previous paragraph, I consider SEO to be a pigfuck bullshit industry of scammers who have helped build the modern dystopian, robot-controlled Internet where everything is optimized around the amount of money it can generate for a degenerate, and I don’t partake in it. I want our sites to work well and to otherwise be luscious gardens of controlled chaos. This is simply for my, and maybe your, curiosity. The data here will not be capitalized on.

One last note: Google separates out query rankings and page rankings, and not all the top ten queries result in the top ten pages. (This is partially because different queries can bring you to the same page, or the same query can result in two different end results.) As such, I’ll go through them separately. Here’s the data with my commentary mixed in:

Google’s top queries

1. ilife sound effects
   • 405 clicks, 778 impressions.
   • This is an amusingly huge thing that draws people in: the iLife Sound Effects hoard on archives that I ripped from the DVDs that came with my first iMac. These are majorly nostalgic for me, and I don’t mind them being up at the top of nearly all our lists.
2. silversun pickups members
   • 118 clicks, 11,289 impressions.
   • I used to run Misery Inspires, a Silversun Pickups fansite, and for a long while now, people have been coming to it largely for this page. Silversun’s lineup hasn’t changed since 2003 or so, but people get curious about Kennedy, their previous rhythm guitarist, and Elvira Gonzalez, their former drummer, and respectively Nikki and Brian’s exes. At least as late as 2019’s Widow’s Weeds, Elvira was still being thanked in the album’s liner notes, and you can spot her as the woman at the door in the “Lazy Eye” video, so I suspect she’s still good friends with them.
3. elvira gonzalez drummer
   • 83 clicks, 691 impressions.
4. mariteaux
   • 78 clicks, 440 impressions.
   • Who’s that delightful little guy?
5. geocities.ws
   • 51 clicks, 4,174 impressions.
   • This is a result of my old Scratchpad post “Please Don’t Use geocities.ws”, where I tried out one of the (at the time) premier free Web hosts banking on the Geocities name. I found it to be a functional, but weirdly scammy-feeling, funnel into a paid host that really wasn’t worth the asking price. People have shared this one around on Reddit and places too, something I’ll talk about later.
6. windows media player skins
   • 46 clicks, 2,387 impressions.
   • Finally, something that isn’t me! This is because of dcb’s WMP skin repository on w2krepo. Quite a nice resource indeed, and one I personally use. There’s some duplicates in there–perhaps I’ll weed those out for him at some point.
7. y cwm lyrics
   • 40 clicks, 445 impressions.
   • And one from Caby! She had a page up on caby_v1 for Welsh-to-English lyric translations, which I quite liked. I think she should do more of them. She liked doing them because it kept her sharp with her Welsh, a language she doesn’t really use day-to-day. (I would still love to see caby.cymru myself, or at least a /cy/ version of the site…)
8. imovie sound effects download
   • 32 clicks, 674 impressions.
9. guitar hero charts
   • 28 clicks, 804 impressions.
   • I have a page in the Guitar Hero modding section of mari.somnol for loose charts. I don’t actually release customs in a loose format anymore, since all the effort’s going towards marfGH volumes, so expect this page to disappear at some point after all the charts have been integrated into said volumes.
10. somnolescent
    • 27 clicks, 1,898 impressions.
    • And we’ll end off with an obvious but welcome one. People looking for us!

Google’s top pages

Again, you’d expect these to be all variations on the above, and a lot are, but not all.

1. https://archives.somnolescent.net/ilife/
   • 391 clicks, 3,121 impressions.
   • I’m assuming the discrepancy in numbers is down to the page having moved at some point. There is a redirect in place, which Google takes as a stronger signal than a canonical. Google actually has both /ilife/ (the old URL) and /hoards/ilife/ (the new URL) in its system at the moment. I imagine in 2026, only the new URL will appear in search results, but who knows.
2. https://mariteaux.somnolescent.net/modding/guitar-hero/tools/
   • 327 clicks, 16,827 impressions.
   • Another one of my little hoards, obviously for tools necessary to mod the Harmonix Guitar Hero games. This page isn’t going away any time soon for sure.
3. https://w2krepo.somnolescent.net/Windows%20Media%20Player/Skins/
   • 307 clicks, 13,320 impressions.
4. https://archives.somnolescent.net/web/misery_inspires/personnel.html
   • 273 clicks, 19.326 impressions.
5. https://blog.somnolescent.net/2025/04/savannahs-book-reviews-get-me-out-of-rf-kuang-hell/
   • 271 clicks, 5,200 impressions.
   • Haha! Oh yeah, I was hoping this would be on here. The second half of this year, this became a really hot page for our site network, Savannah’s mystified review of two of RF Kuang’s books. I’m not gonna speak for Savannah on books I haven’t read, but she does sound like a funny sorta author, and a very divisive one, which is probably why people are seeking out writeups shitting on her work.
6. https://archives.somnolescent.net/web/mari_v3/junk/ilifesfx/
   • 259 clicks, 6,228 impressions.
   • This specifically links to my explanation page on mari_v3 about how I ripped and converted the sound effects from my discs and also why.
7. https://mariteaux.somnolescent.net/modding/guitar-hero/tutorials/building-an-iso/
   • 239 clicks, 18,447 impressions.
   • A simple little tutorial about the way you turn the files of a PS2 game into a bootable disc. This is actually useful information outside of Guitar Hero itself–I’ve used this to rebuild demo discs and occasionally other games, usually to remove padding files so my MX4SIO card doesn’t need to have 2GB of it taken up by, I dunno, that South Park episode (PS1 games don’t boot on MX4SIO, but it’s a funny story, so I’m linking it anyway).
8. https://archives.somnolescent.net/web/mari_v3/blog/2020/04/please-dont-use-geocities-ws/
   • 208 clicks, 19,654 impressions.
9. https://mariteaux.somnolescent.net/modding/guitar-hero/tutorials/
   • 182 clicks, 6,788 impressions.
10. https://archives.somnolescent.net/web/dcb_nc9/articles/wiiaudio.html
    • 167 clicks, 5,565 impressions.
    • Ending off with a real old-school one, Neocities dcb’s tutorial on ripping music from Wii games. If I recall, he used this method to extract out the Uno WiiWare OST, which is a very dcb game to try to rip from.

Bing’s top pages

And here’s the Decision Engine’s take on Somnolescent. Queries not listed because they’re spammy garbage as said. This actually only goes back to early November, because for whatever reason, Bing doesn’t like you to have data for your domain prior to when you registered it with them. Still, it’s a slightly different dataset, and while they’re not counted in the numbers, all the “privacy-focused” search engines use Bing as the basis for their results, so I imagine what ranks well on Bing does similarly well on Qwant and Ecosia and DuckDuckGo and all them.

1. https://archives.somnolescent.net/hoards/ilife/
   • 40 clicks, 106 impressions.
2. https://archives.somnolescent.net/hoards/guitar-hero-isos/
   • 14 clicks, 333 impressions.
   • Another from my modding section, this is what I’d like to direct all the Google traffic for my loose charts towards eventually.
3. https://mariteaux.somnolescent.net/modding/guitar-hero/charts/
   • 10 clicks, 136 impressions.
4. https://mariteaux.somnolescent.net/modding/guitar-hero/tools/
   • 10 clicks, 222 impressions.
5. https://mariteaux.somnolescent.net/modding/guitar-hero/tutorials/finding-stems/
   • 5 clicks, 10 impressions.
6. https://archives.somnolescent.net/web/mari_v3/games/gh2/tools/
   • 4 clicks, 36 impressions.
   • Let’s just group all those. We got another one of my random modding tutorials, plus the mari_v3 version of my tools page. (I have canonicals set, so Bing really shouldn’t be delivering that out over the one on mari.somnol proper. Can you tell I’m less impressed with Bing?)
7. https://archives.somnolescent.net/web/misery_inspires/personnel.html
   • 4 clicks, 95 impressions.
8. https://archives.somnolescent.net/web/dcb_nc9/articles/wiiaudio.html
   • 4 clicks, 72 impressions.
9. https://mariteaux.somnolescent.net/modding/guitar-hero/tutorials/building-audio-with-rockaudio/
   • 4 clicks, 13 impressions.
   • Another tutorial. I find it interesting that both of them deal with specifically stems and game audio. The one on Google was focused on just getting the game rebuilt.
10. https://mariteaux.somnolescent.net/writing/recommendations/music/lush/gala/
    • 3 clicks, 5 impressions.
    • Hey, one of my album reviews! These are actually trickling into the Google dataset as well in not huge amount, but noticeable in the aggregate. I wrote a bit of PHP to generate automatically-updating sitemaps for both the game and music reviews and now submit mari.somnol’s sitemap as a sitemap index instead, so every time I push a new one, they get indexed. That’s a cool thing to see, especially for stuff I write in like twenty minutes whenever I’m in the mood.

There are some other, more interesting pages that show up further down the list, like the hoard of archived MSN Neopets icons (which we’re currently using as Discord icons in Somnolescent, fun fact), or my “structure of a Gopher menu” page from the old mari’s Gopher Repository, or, weirdly enough, Districts’ about page, but again, I’m ranking by number of clicks, not impressions.

Miscellaneous factoids about Somnolescent’s Google-going audience

• Our top ten countries reached ranked by clicks are the US, the UK, Canada, Brazil, Australia, the Philippines, Indonesia, Germany, Ireland, and France. I suspect Brazil and Indonesia are on there because of the big ongoing PS2 (and thus Guitar Hero) modding scenes in those countries. Germany seems to mostly be hunting out iLife sound effects and Pokémon wallpapers, and France wants to read my reviews of Lemonheads and Jane’s Addiction albums.
• Desktop searches still reign supreme on somnolescent.net! 4,624 of last year’s clicks came from desktop browsers, while 3,485 clicks came from phones. Only 295 came from tablets. What can we say, our audience is as old as heart as we are sometimes.
• Our best day for search clicks was November 13, with 50 clicks in total, while our worst is a tie between January 1, 12, 17, 29, March 14, and September 19, with ten clicks apiece. (Best day for impressions and overall visibility was this past Monday, December 29, with 5,034 impressions translating into 38 clicks.)
• Our best day for getting people to click on Somnol links was February 22, with a CTR of 3.8%.
• September 14 was the best day for highest average ranking in search results, around spot #8. In trend lines, since that day, we’ve been holding steady between the average spot of #8 and #13 in search results, which tells me either I did something that meant Google promoted us from then on, or Google fucked with something that gave us a boost.

What awaits somnolescent.net in 2026?

I was actually working on another post for the year-end retrospective carousel called “What Happened to All Our Upgrade Plans?”, which was meant to be a look back at various intentions I had for the site network going back to late 2019. There were really only two posts I could find of that ilk, and a third that was my personal intentions at some point in the 2020s, so I dropped it.

I’m very pleased with somnolescent.net these days. Basically everything I’ve ever wanted to do with it, CCSO servers and Gopher, Internet radio, a Somnol IRC room, getting Letters off the old blog_v1 theme and onto something more comfortable, turning archives into a Somnol museum, has at least been attempted, if not properly happened by now. My own sites are redesigned and futureproof, as far as I’m concerned. There’s really not a lot I still want to do with it all–I’m finally happy to enjoy it as it is.

As such, my focus drifts more from radical overhaul to being a custodian of everything I and my friends get up to. The last few months, I’ve been quietly retiring subdomains, finally getting rid of unused databases, fixing broken links, improving search performance, and again, futureproofing things. What’s old, I’ve finally found homes for that aren’t in the other Somnolians’ site files, getting tossed around and mixed up and overwhelming everyone. Slowly, I find better ways of organizing seven years of stray thoughts and detritus from about a dozen individuals in all. I’m still doing quarterly site backups, and everything is kept safe across multiple backup mediums.

There’s still work to be done. I’m not totally happy with the category and tagging system on Letters. I’ve got the right idea, but I still think I could make it easier to find things on specific topics than I have. Some of the old recaps have been updated with archives links to old Pennyverse stories and site redesigns, but not all, so I gotta keep going on those at some point. On the whole, though, my goal is upgrading, updating, simplifying and cleaning up the site network has largely been achieved. Things feel good and settled around here.

With all that time I’ve spent in 2025 doing boring redesign stuff, we can get back to focusing on what Somnol has always done best–thinking about technicolor animal people, talking about inane shit, and accidentally getting “Hacker” “News” interested in the latter. We miss you every day, n-gate.