Googling for ‘weblog’Jerz’s Literacy Weblog)
I found this line in my weblog tracking service today:
03 Feb, Tue, 15:49:46 http://www.google.com/search?q=weblog&hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-8&start=100&sa=N
My weblog main page generally gets a couple hits from Google each day, and I do like to see what people are searching for, so out of habit I glanced in the URL for the keyword — and I was a little surprised. Yup — someone’s Google search for “weblog” turned up this site on a page of results starting at 100 — and then someone clicked on that link, thus generating the above line in my tracking service. I checked and for the moment anyway, out of nearly 9 million Google hits for “weblog,” my blog comes up 109th.
I know this ranking thing is pretty much meaningless, and I’m sure this is just a fluke — but it’s a pleasant fluke, so I printed out the page to have a keepsake.
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Be proud. Traffic to your site is nothing to sneeze at. Manipulating search engines for traffic is not rocket science; it?s more often than not porn science. Looking back, in the infancy of the internet you would not believe the number of beanie baby sites that led to porn. Let us hope that searches for information in the future are not completely controlled by marketing efforts.
I don't quite get it either...in my "Writing Fiction" blog (http://crofsblogs.typepad.com/fiction/), I get about 350 hits a day, most of them from Google searches. When I check, I see that many of them are searching for the phrase "writing fiction"--and out of 4.5 million hits, my site is either first or in the top five.
And this is a site that's been up only since last summer.
Interesting... I just googled for "literacy" and my handouts page comes in somewhere around 50 out of 6 million... my weblog page appears in the indended position beneath my handouts page. I think that probably supports my suggestion that it's my own network of links to and from that bank of handouts that has something to do with the ranking... there really aren't all that many inbound links pointing to my handout pages. But I don't have tons of links using the word "literacy", so I still don't quite get it.
Hmm, that's reminds me. We should put "Jerz's Literacy Weblog" in h1 tags, to designate it as the title. hmm, I'll go do that right now.
What do you think accounts for this? The fact that the word "weblog" is in your title? The number of times you use the word "weblog"? The number of searches that say "Jerz" and "weblog" in the same string? The number of times someone searching "weblog" has clicked-through to your site? I'm not entirely sure how page rank works.
Right... I'll get back to you soon, Clancy! Sorry to keep you waiting.
Hey, Dennis, I'm trying to get in touch with you regarding the blog collection. Please let me know if you got that email from Jessica, and let me know what's going on. Thanks!
I was going to suggest that maybe the Google spider just recently visited my site, and the "freshness" of my content gave me a temporary boost... but Google's cached copy of my blog home page was taken on 24 Jan, so that shoots that idea. It's probably some combination of the fact that I've got a big collection of writing handouts, each of which contains in the main navigation menu a link titled "weblog" that takes you to my blog home page; and all the titles of the permalink and category pages also include the word "weblog".
Google turns up 24 million hits on "blog" and my site isn't in the top 500 (I just checked -- with Google set to return 100 results at a time, so it didn't take much effort). So I'm sure it does have something to do with the way my site uses the word "weblog".