What happens when a search leads to a non-relevant site

[youfoundjake]

For the past 8 or 9 months, I've been searching by using a very specific phrase, to find the information I need.

I use Internet Explorer, Firefox, and Chrome, and most of the time I am logged into my igoogle profile.

Here's where it gets interesting. One of the benefits of having a site with low traffic, is I get to really see how the visitors come to it. I get maybe 10 visits a day to one site in particular of mine.

A couple of days ago, I was looking at Google Analytics, and I saw that a visitor came to my site using the exact same phrase that I have been using for the past 8 or 9 months. And here is the kicker, my site has absolutely nothing to do with this particular search term. When I tried searching by the phrase again, my site of course does not pop up, which it shouldn't but I'm still confused on how on that one day, it appeared.

I cannot wrap my brain around this, it's driving me nuts. Has anyone seen anything like this, or have a theory?

[piatkow]

I have seen it as well. I can't remember if it was with Google, Yahoo or MSN.

[ecmedia]

No search engine is perfect and Google included. For most of us here, that receive millions of visitors each month, we often see tens of thousands of visitors that came by mistake. A classic example is anything to do with Steve Jobs. Apple CEO or a Steve who keeps changing jobs every 2 months. Sometimes all the keywords one uses in a query may be on the same page and magically that is what might appear on page one. The other thing is that when people search, they do click on a page knowing fully well that it is not something that they want for that specific query but are still interested in it anyway.

So the lesson is that these visitors are still good because they get exposed to your site and might like it for some other reason, though, not for the initial query that brought them there.

[dstiles]

Could it have been google checking up on that phrase?

MSN, for example, continually hit sites with referer spam using fairly arbitrary keywords which they think may be relevant to the site. Maybe google are doing the same.

Was it a google IP? Not necessarily a cincher but it would help if it were.

[youfoundjake]

But the question is, how is a search term that I have been using for such a long time, pulling up my own website when the two aren't even related?

It's like searching for Stonehenge, and the SERPS are filled with webmasterworld pages. Makes no sense. What if brett has been searching for Stonehenge for the past year, wouldn't it be odd that the serps are displaying webmasterworld for that search term?
Something is bleeding over into something else me thinks...