The phone rings this morning. The call display says it’s someone in Wyoming. Uh-oh.
ME: Hello?
THEM: Hi there. It’s Margaret Hanson calling from Laramie, Wyoming.
ME: (Swallows audibly.) What can I do for you?
THEM: I’d like to order a horse soccer ball.
I see that I’m ranked third for the Google search horse soccer, because of this unassuming post.
It took some convincing for Margaret (not her real name) to believe that I lived in a large Canadian city and was unassociated with equine ball sports, amateur or professional.
It’s a conversation I have at least once a month, and it demonstrates the irrational value people place in a high Google ranking. That is:
Ranked high in search engine = Authority on search terms
That’s true some of the time, but not often enough to be reliable. Maybe I need to do a better job at explaining just what my site is, and what I’m not an expert in (which, of course, is nearly everything) on every page.
The funny this is that if you check out the search result for horse soccer ball, the very first result reads:
You’ll get a 50 inch inflatable HORSE SOCCERâ„¢ Ball, and a step-by-step instructional video, … Sending the horse soccer ball down the field. …
www.horsesoccer.com/ – 7k – Cached – Similar pages
Maybe Margaret raises Shetland ponies, so the 50 inch model is too big?
DarrenBarefoot.com 
The official site also sports this page :
http://www.horsesoccer.com/OtherUses.htm
Informative though it is, I personally found it a little unimaginative – perhaps your readers could come up with some alternative uses ?
I get a call every week to ten days for someone looking to purchase skin & blood. Apparently my phone number is one digit off from the local expert on and broker of materials for special effects makeup.
It took several calls to convince a woman who got in touch with me a few months ago that I do not manufacture elaborate 3D textured old-style decorative globes. And I was never able to figure out what search terms she used that brought her to my website, even though she claimed to have found me as such a manufacturer through Google.
But if I were at all interested in starting up that business, I know I’d have a clientele.
The weirdest call I ever got was from an elderly gent who wanted to trade his meeting room space in another province for help in starting a blog.