I was searching the name of an old school friend of mine recently - well last year actually - and there were about 300 hits. I noticed that a bridge society he’s active in provided the first two hits. Then, last week, I searched again, and, of all things, a blogger was number one. Apparently, this man had written a book, which had been reviewed by the blogger.
I wondered how these things are done. It wouldn’t appear to be no. of hits, as the blog’s traffic doesn’t appear to be very high, judging from the paucity of comments offered. So what are the major determining factors for getting numero uno (or even on the front page) of a google search?
Of course Google doesn’t know the number of hits that a given web page gets; they’d need access to every server’s access logs for that. The specifics of Google’s page ranking algorithm are secret, but it’s based on keyword relevance and a weighted score of relevant pages that link to the page in question. So to get a high rank for the search term “roger thornhill”, there need to be many other pages containing the term “roger thornhill” that link to your page.
Search engine optimization has spawned a whole industry of people who try to influence search results. Some of them use rather scummy techniques which are rarely sucessful due to their ubiquity.
I’m not sure if this occured “naturally” or as a result of a campaign to skew the results but go to Google and type in “liar” and hit I’m Feeling Lucky.
There is also another amusing result if you type in the following word (i’m not sure on the rules of swearing in this forum so i’ll put the word in a spoiler).