You know that scene in movies where someone steps on a landmine?
Everything seems to stop at once. The victim freezes in place, muscles locked, afraid that even breathing too loudly might be enough to set it off, while everyone around them falls silent too, caught somewhere between panic and disbelief.
A few seconds pass, and nothing happens.
Gradually, relief begins to creep in.
The tension loosens just enough for the person to let out a breath they didn’t realize they were holding, maybe even smile, maybe even lift a hand in a small, joking wave.
Around them, other people begin to relax too, convincing themselves that the danger has passed.
And then:
BOOM.
The explosion comes late, almost cruelly late, but when it finally arrives, it tears through the moment and sends shockwaves and shrapnel in every direction.
I’ve seen that scene in movies and cartoons more times than I can count, and strangely enough, I’ve lived it too.
Not with an actual landmine, of course.
Mine was worse in a different way: less visible, but just as damaging.
It was an internet landmine.
And just like the ones in the movies, it didn’t explode right away. It waited. It gave me time to feel safe, to celebrate, and to convince myself that I had won.
Then, months later, it finally detonated, so violently it felt like the internet had put me in a microwave, hit “high,” and walked away laughing.
But as ridiculous and painful as it was, the experience taught me a lot. It forced me to develop patience, emotional control, and the hard (but genuinely valuable) understanding that not every opinion on the internet deserves a place in your head.
And all of it began with one absurd question:
Are eggs chicken periods?
Yes. Really.
The Keyword That Should Have Stayed in Drafts
Get it right, and you can build traffic, authority, and real income. Get it wrong, and your website slowly dies in silence.
Back then, I was the managing director of a group of websites, and one of my biggest responsibilities was finding strong topics for my writers.
In many ways, I was the idea engine, making sure the team always had subjects people were actively searching for.
For anyone unfamiliar with keyword research, the short version is simple: you figure out what people are typing into Google, and then you create the best possible content around those searches. If you do it well, Google rewards you with visibility. That, in essence, is what SEO entails.
So, on independence day, October 1st, 2019, I sat down to do exactly that for my food blog, thewisebaker.com - a site I would later sell for a little over *** thousand dollars, only to watch it vanish from the internet as though it had never existed. In hindsight, I probably should have kept the portfolio.
The site mostly focused on recipes, cooking tips, and practical how-to content. Safe territory. Predictable territory. Certainly not the kind of place where I expected to stumble into a full-blown internet war.
Then, while using one of my favorite keyword tool, Keywords Everywhere, I came across a search query that made me stop:
“Are eggs chicken periods?”
I stared at it.
Then I laughed.
Because really, who asks that?
And maybe more importantly, why?
On a normal day, I probably would have skipped right past it.
It wasn’t typical food-blog material, and I generally preferred recipe-driven or tutorial-style topics.
But this keyword had a few things working in its favor that were impossible to ignore.
- It was weird.
- It was emotionally charged.
- And somehow, it had serious search volume.
We’re talking 10,000+ searches a month.
For publishers, that’s no joke, especially for a long-tail keyword that specific. And if you’ve spent enough time in publishing, you know keyword tools often underestimate traffic.
So if a tool tells you 10K, the real number can easily be higher.
That meant one thing: curiosity was driving real demand. And where there is curiosity, there is usually opportunity.
So I saved the keyword and decided I’d write this one myself.
Partly because I was curious. Partly because if this turned out to be one of those strange “million-dollar questions” the internet latches onto, it deserved a proper answer.
The Research
At that point, I had two clear hopes going into the research, ranked in order of importance:
- Eggs were not actually chicken periods, because otherwise I genuinely didn’t know what my relationship with breakfast was going to look like going forward.
- The keyword had little to no real competition, meaning nobody on the first three pages of Google had written a solid article on it. If that turned out to be true, then I had stumbled onto something special.
So I Googled the exact question.
After a quick skim through pages one to three, I noticed something interesting: no serious website seemed to be answering it properly.
Most of what showed up were comment snippets, Reddit threads, Quora opinions, Facebook debates, and other forms of social-media noise. Plenty of opinions, very little actual research.
From a publishing standpoint, that was gold.
It was exactly the kind of keyword any content publisher dreams about: high interest, weak competition, and a search results page full of random internet comments that could easily be outranked by one well-researched article.
Still, one question kept wandering around in the back of my mind:
Why was nobody else seriously trying to answer this?
Because normally, when a keyword has that much search volume, writers are watching it every single day.
Someone, somewhere, should have jumped on it already.
But I brushed the thought aside and basked in the joy of finding what felt like a hidden gem.
Then I went back and studied the results more carefully, which was already part of my research process.
And while digging through the social-media noise, I came across PETA’s response to the question.
Now, PETA is a well-known animal advocacy organization, so naturally I took their position seriously.
But what I found on their page caught me off guard.
Their argument was that eggs were essentially chicken periods, and they used that framing as part of a broader message against consuming animal products. They also referenced blood spots sometimes found in eggs as part of that argument.
And then, in classic PETA fashion, the rest of the piece leaned heavily into the cruelty that can happen in egg-production systems.
On that broader issue, I’m absolutely against animal cruelty, so I understood the larger moral point they were trying to make.
But the biological claim itself was what really caught my attention.
So I dug deeper.
And the deeper I dug, the more complicated it became.
At one point, I found an explanation from another article that sounded very convincing on the surface:
Humans expel unfertilized eggs during menstruation. Chickens lay unfertilized eggs. Therefore, eggs are basically chicken periods. - As of April 12th, 2026, the article where I originally found that analogy has since taken it down.
At first glance, that logic sounds neat. Maybe even persuasive.
And at that point, I had to pause and ask myself:
Surely I haven’t been eating this for breakfast all these years without knowing what it really was… right?
And surely I wasn’t about to write an article telling the internet that eggs were chicken periods based entirely on somebody else’s analogy.
So I decided to do my own 1 + 1.
I went back to basics and broke the question down into three parts:
- How periods form in humans and other mammals
- How chickens produce and lay eggs
- What, if any, biological relationship exists between the two
That, I figured, would give me the clearest possible foundation for answering the question properly.
So I dove straight in, spending hours on end doing research.
And eventually, I arrived at the answer that brought great peace to my breakfast life:
Eggs are not chicken periods.
At least, that was the conclusion I felt confident defending based on the biology I had studied.
That gave me a clear direction.
My path was set. My breakfast was safe. My imaginary route to the Nobel Peace Prize, or at least a few thousand dollars in traffic revenue, was suddenly wide open.
The Day I Hit Publish and Walked Into Trouble
So I sat down to write.
The article took me two days: one day for the draft and another for editing and polishing.
As at writing this, April 12, 2026, the first repost version on a wordpress site is no longer online. I sold the website, along with a good chunk of my portfolio, a long time ago, and the new owner has since retired it completely.
Thankfully, an archived version is still floating around online with some of the transferred comments, and mercifully, none of the mean ones made it over.
I do still have the old ORIGINAL Blogger version, though, all the ruthless comments included.
Anyways, in the end, the piece was 1,900+ words long, and I felt good about it. I had laid out what I believed was a strong, well-reasoned case for why eggs were not chicken periods.
I proofread it, hit publish, and waited.
Within about four, five months, the article had climbed to the very top.
Number one on Google and other search engines.
Across regions. Across countries. Everywhere.
And as you can imagine, the traffic was wild.
A lot of people were searching. A lot of people were landing on my article.
And, in my view, a lot of confused breakfast eaters were being rescued.
For the first few months, things felt almost triumphant. I was replying to thank-you messages from strangers in my inbox and in the comment section of the post itself.
And that, in hindsight, was the quiet part.
The part before the explosion.
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| This was the article in its early days, already drawing about 7.9K readers and 9 comments within its first few months. Over the years, I moved the site twice, and with each migration I lost some transferred comments (due to the complications of switching from blogger platform to wordpress) and had to republish with different dates. The article still lives in my Blogger drafts today, but it will remain there for |
The Morning the Internet Found Me
And whenever a day goes that smoothly, maybe that’s exactly when you should start getting suspicious.
I woke up to my little niece sitting in the middle of the rug in my room, surrounded by her mum’s full makeup kit and enthusiastically turning her face into something halfway between a beauty tutorial and a minor emergency.
It was a strange way to start the day, sure, but still cute enough to register as charming rather than alarming.
Then came breakfast, somehow prepared by the laziest person in the family: my baby sister.
A few hours later, I checked my Mediavine dashboard and saw that my blog payment had gone through successfully. It was payday, and a good one too. No payment issues. No email mismatch drama. No tedious back-and-forth. Just money landing peacefully where it was supposed to land.
That alone was enough to make the day feel blessed.
Even my girlfriend’s usual ten-minute burst of madness on the phone had mysteriously failed to appear.
Looking back, that probably should have been my first real warning sign that the universe was simply delaying the nonsense until later.
Everything was going suspiciously well.
So I moved on to one of my favorite morning routines: logging into my websites for a quick pulse check on traffic, rankings, wins, losses, and whatever new opportunities might be hiding in the numbers.
Eventually, I opened my baby, my favorite website, thewisebaker.com
And that’s when I saw it.
A brutal comment on my egg article.
Not a disagreement. Not a critique.
A full-on internet knockout punch, the kind of comment that makes you stop mid-scroll and reread it just to make sure someone really took that much time to be that angry.
It didn’t just go after my argument. It came for my logic, my character, my intelligence, my ancestors, and somehow my entire bloodline, all because I had written a blog post about eggs.
I could barely finish reading it.
In an instant, my beautiful morning tilted off balance.
My heart started racing, because up until then, I had never had a stranger come at me online with that kind of intensity.
I told myself I was unbothered, left the comment where it was, closed the tab, and kept checking the rest of my sites like a professional pretending everything was perfectly normal.
But it wasn’t normal.
And a few days later, it got worse.
 |
| One of the mean comments from the early days. By the brutal standards of that roast, this was actually considered polite. You really do not want to see what the others said. 😭 |
The Flood
They came from random people, through random inboxes, but they all carried the same energy, and none of it was kind.
Some were insults. Some were threats. Some promised to report me and my account.
Others told me exactly what they thought of me in language so colorful it could have passed for abstract art.
At first, the whole thing felt unreal.
Imagine opening your inbox and discovering that people you have never met are passionately furious because you said eggs are not chicken periods.
For a while, it almost seemed ridiculous.
Then it stopped being funny.
Because once that kind of negativity starts hitting you over and over again, it stops feeling absurd and starts settling somewhere deeper.
It wears on your mind. It follows you around.
It affects your mood, your appetite, and your sense of ease in ways that are difficult to explain until you’ve lived through it.
The comments kept coming. The emails kept coming. And each new one seemed harsher than the last, as though every message was trying to outdo the one before it.
At some point, I genuinely considered deleting everything: the comments, the article, the website, maybe even my entire online existence.
But in the end, I didn’t.
And thank God I didn’t.
Because if I had, I probably never would have understood what that whole experience was actually trying to teach me.
Life Goes On
Days turned into weeks, weeks into months, and for a long time it was just me battling comments here and there while my blood pressure rose and fell with each new one.
Sometimes I replied, doing my best not to take things personally, only to get a response that hurt even more than the original comment. After a while, I learned to leave those alone.
Other times, I tried to reason with people, but it quickly became obvious that some of them were not looking for a conversation.
They were just enjoying the roasting. Once I realized that, I stopped giving them the satisfaction.
Still, of all the things I did right during that period, I’m glad I never deleted a single comment.
My article stayed at the top of Google for more than a year before Google, perhaps deciding I had been roasted enough, started giving newer blogs a chance at the number one spot.
Some of those newer articles came from sites with stronger authority than mine.
Others were basically just my logic reheated and served on a different plate.
But that’s SEO: someone can say almost exactly what you said and still outrank you simply because they’ve been around longer.
And what did the whole experience teach me?
A lot.
- It taught me that controversy can be profitable, but it’s rarely cheap. The money may be good, but the mental cost can be even greater.
- It taught me that not every loud voice deserves to be treated as truth, and that if something matters to you, you should verify it for yourself instead of borrowing convictions from whoever sounds the most confident.
-It taught me that writing online takes more than facts. It takes patience, emotional discipline, and the ability to tell the difference between a real battle and performative noise. It takes knowing when to push back, and when protecting your peace is the wiser move.
And more than anything, it taught me that the world out there is rough.
The internet is rougher.
So if you ever choose a path like mine, especially a writing one, be ready for heat.
Because attention is never free.
Sometimes it arrives with applause.
Sometimes it arrives with knives.
And if the demons do find you, just make sure the article was worth it.
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