I’ve come to notice something very interesting on one of my eCommerce stores and I’m beginning to wonder if this is just a coincidence or something that can be attributed to Google.

MyOutwardHound.com is a small, niche store that primarily sells the Outward Hound line of dog gear that includes car booster seats, dog strollers, dog life vests, and outdoor gear for dogs. The manufacturer of these products is the Kyjen Company located in Huntington Beach, California. Since the site is pretty keyword rich in “Outward Hound” terms, our search engine placement is good – which is a double edge sword. People looking to buy Outward Hound items find us pretty quickly, but so do people who think we’re the manufacturer and are looking for replacement parts or warranty information.

To help those customers who aren’t looking to buy, but need the contact information of the manufacturer, I added the following text to the customer service page:

Outward Hound Product Warranty Question or Information:
For question regarding replacement parts, accessories or warranty claims on Outward Hound pet product, please contact the manufacturer directly at:

The Kyjen Company, Inc.
P.O. Box 793
Huntington Beach, CA 92648

Phone: 800-477-5735
Fax: 714-841-8979
E-mail: info-mail@kyjen.com

Since that text was added, nearly 16% of site visits for February MTD comes from the state of California, which is more 3 times more than the second highest state.

I started noticing the number of orders being shipped to CA and I had to dig further into why, and the numbers got me thinking.

Is Google (or other engines for that matter) crawling pages like this looking for information that may determine where orders ship from and geo-target search results based on where the search originates from? Or, do these products fit the California lifestyle?

That same page has an address on it for our office in Wilkes-Barre, PA, but traffic from Pennsylvania is just like any other state according to the sites analytics. I want to ride out the month of February before making changes to this page, but come March, I’m going to remove the California address and do a test to see if site traffic from California users decreases.

I’ll keep you posted with my findings. In the mean time, if you own a dog that you spend a lot of time with outdoors, check out MyOutwardHound.com – even if you don’t live in California.

When I first started in business back in 1994, I set out to sell supplies for pet ferrets and other “exotic” critters. The name given to the company at that time was “Northeast Exotic Pet Supply.” But just after a few weeks, ferret owners complained by the dozens that “ferrets are not exotic animals.”

So in a mad dash the name was changed to simply NEEPS since we already owned the neeps.com domain and domain names were far more expensive than they are today. So we did business as NEEPS until we saved up enough money to buy TheFerretStore.com domain.

I’m always asked where the names of the companies I owned came from. Take Solid Cactus for instance. It means absolutely nothing. We were sitting around the office one day wondering what to call the company, I wanted something that looked good in a logo, we tossed shapes around and came up with the funky name that caught on quickly.

When I’m asked what NEEPS stands for, I pass on the pet supply explanation and cut straight to the alternate ending. It means nothing. Nothing Except Extremely Pathetic Shit. That always illicits a chuckle from the ask-ee, then I tell them the truth.

I always look at company names and try to figure out the meaning behind them. The other night I passed a furniture store with a name that made me smile. With my camera at the ready, I snapped away in the hopes that you will get a chuckle out of it as well.

I just wonder what the “more” is.