This is not a plug for my site–really–but how does a page that doesn’t seem to “follow all the (conventional) rules” as far as keywording end up at the top of a Google search even though their page has almost nothing to do with the main keywords?
Meaning, the proper meta-tag principle seems to vanish into thin air with the #1, yet a page that has followed “all the rules” ends up below the top 50?
(NB. I’m not talking about those highlighted sites that always appear at the top of the search results page–just the ones below.)
Case in point: asandals merchant which seems to have very little to do with the keywords “Sole Survivor,” yet comes in at number one for the keywords.
I looked at their code and there is nothing that seems to make it an obvious #1 for the keywords “Sole Survivor.”
On a side note, I’ve received spam claiming to “Put you in the Google Top Ten guaranteed! Here’s how: blah blah blah.”
Could it be true that there is some kind of Google loophole that circumvents the prevailing theories and inserts some kind of “secret code” that blasts the page to the top ten? Maybe like that thing awhile back (can’t remember the details) where if you typed “George Bush” into Google, you got an incredibly scatalogical site, a situation that actually forced the White house to respond to.
I believe a lot of the Google PageRank is based not on the content of a page, but rather on how many other sites link to that page and what those linking pages are about.
“Sole Survivor” appears to be a popular brand of leather goods. If you want the movie, try “Sole Survivor movie”. See Severian’s link, and know that people have tried boosting their pagerank, but Google is in the business of providing links that users want to see, not ones the page owners want them to. (Revolutionary!).
As for keywords, they haven’t been used exclusively in ages. Can’t remember why…
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I have no idea how Google works. I run The CJ2A Page, a site all about the 1945-1949 Willys CJ2A “Jeep”. For a long time it was the top site on Google when people were looking for CJ2A pages. And no wonder. Unlike all of the other pages out there that mention this particular model or someone’s homepage where they display their own Jeep, my site is devoted entirely to the CJ2A. I’ve been told by people who visit it that it has the best information on it. People find it extremely useful when researching their rigs.
But about a year and a half ago, the domain disappeared from Google. Completely. I have over 50 pages of photos submitted by CJ2A owners, nearly a score of pages for the original Owner’s Manual, and more pages for paint chips, histories, vintage advertising, etc. But none of them show up on Google. The only exposure I get is from other Jeep pages that have linked to mine. I contacted Google and they said that their robot finds the pages and that no one has removed me from their database. But if I’m having a problem being listed, I can pay them for a commercial listing. :rolleyes: Hey, my page is supposed to provide information to hobbyists at no charge. I’m paying for the server. I paid for a lot of the content. I’ve spent a lot of time creating the page and continue to spend a lot of time maintaining it. And the only money I make is through a paltry few book sales from Amazon. Not enough to pay for the server.
So if anyone knows how I can get re-listed, please let me know!
It’s possible that people stopped linking to your page. You should check everyone who linked to your page at one time, and make sure their links are up to date and working properly.
Achernar: I checked several links at random from the google search, and they are active.
Exapno Mapcase: I used the “Links Find pages that link to the page” option in the Google “advanced search”, and it returned no results. I think they just have it in for me.
There is a simple explanation for http://www.thecj2apage.com/ not being indexed in Google anymore: The server is misconfigured.
I have tried retrieving the page at that URL with the wget utility, using different user-agent strings (the user-agent string is how web browsers and other clients e.g. search engine spiders identify themselves to the web server).
Results:
simulating retrieval an user-agent that does not identify itself
user-agent: empty string i.e. no user-agent given
Result: web server returns error code 403 (Forbidden)
simulating retrieval by Googlebot, Google’s spider:
user-agent: Googlebot/2.1 (+http://www.googlebot.com/bot.html)
Result: web server returns error code 403 (Forbidden)
simulating retrieval by Microsoft Internet Explorer 5.01 running on Windows 2000:
user-agent: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 5.01; Windows NT 5.0)
Result: web server returns result code 200 (OK) and serves the web page (8087 bytes).
Conclusion: Someone changed your web server’s configuration in order to serve different content depending on the user-agent string. There are legitimate uses of this in high-end web design (serving a web page tweaked for the exact web browser version used), and there are also more shady uses (serving a keyword-filled page to search engine spiders and a normal page to web browsers). Anyway, whoever installed this did not test it properly; when search engine spiders request your page the web server slams the door in their faces (code 403), but web browsers get served the page (code 200).
There used to be “link farms” that could get you to the top of Google (presumably the ones responsible for related spam). OTOH, Google is on to them now and any site that’s caught using them gets penalized a fairly large number of spots in the ranking. In other words, you really don’t want to be doing that.
I’ve been curious about Google’s ranking myself. Not long ago I discovered that an increase in traffic to my website was due to a page I’d written on Starbucks drinks coming up top of the list if one searched for “Starbucks drinks”. However, if one searches for my online handle, my message board (which has been dead for some time), my old defunct web page, my BBboard profile and my livejournal all turn up before my actual website. Is there anything I can do to pull my old pages further down the list?
If your site is listed in the Google Directory, you can use the bar graphic next to your listing to approximate the PageRank by following this guide. If it’s not listed, you need the toolbar.
