Messing around with gscloud.pl against the webtuesday access logs and noticed a surprising number of referrals from Google for searches like 14th November – the 9th result takes you to to here! (I’m not logged out from Google so I assume these aren’t somehow weighted by my search history)
Exploring further…
- Search: 16th May – 7th result to here.
- Search: 13th June – 3rd result to here
- Search: 11th July – 13th result to here
- Search: 8th August – 6th result to here
- Search: 12th September – 13th result to here (just think if we’d held it one day earlier…)
- Search: 10th October – 5th result to here
- Search: 12th December – 10th result to here
- Search: 9th January – 6th result to here
That last meeting on the 9th Jan 2007 has yet to happen, was only created just over 2 weeks ago and has had no signficant external linking-to, other than upcoming.
Here’s a snippet of webtuesday access log analysis (thanks to visitors);
* Number of unique visitors: 1492 * Different days in logfile: 6 29/Oct/2006: 224 |################################## 15.0% 30/Oct/2006: 243 |##################################### 16.3% 31/Oct/2006: 216 |################################# 14.5% 01/Nov/2006: 249 |###################################### 16.7% 02/Nov/2006: 282 |############################################ 18.9% 03/Nov/2006: 278 |########################################### 18.6%
… this is not a site taking a lot of traffic and in terms semantic relevance to someone searching for these dates, it’s a bunch of nerds meeting here to discuss nerdy things.
Can only guess either…
- No ones jumped on dates for SEO
- Google takes Sitepoint too seriously (for the right price *nudge* *wink* – joke!)
- The Internet is by nerds for nerds (hence we deserve the best results)
- ?
Considering this, think there’s a way to go before Tim needs to get worried.
Anyway – would be happy to see those results drop their rank – it’s just wrong.
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I think your guess about “Google takes Sitepoint too seriously” is correct, I know that google give extra respect to some websites in some “ranges” of words.
some times I target a keyword for web hosting and got bunch of good results in similar key words .. similar here is really wide thing, like I target “affordable” and got results in “low cost”. I think its similar in how adwords suggest keywords.
November 5th, 2006 at 7:13 pm
Huh?
November 6th, 2006 at 9:16 am
If nothing else, I love the links you incorporate in your blog entries, Harry. gscloud.pl looks interesting, but even more interesting (imo) is visitors, and linked from that site, PHP Interactive (which I will be letting friends who are learning PHP know about, first thing; my boss might like this too, he’s learning).
As far as this is concerned, I would imagine that the biggest problem is the lack of SEO using dates, but then again, how many sites could actually specifically use (only) dates as a relevant and meaningful keyword? History-based websites, perhaps, but are there that many? I think many of your results showed them. Because Webtuesday’s site is using a wiki, and that wiki is automatically creating a page title of the entry, and the entry is the date…not only do you have it in the title (weighted highly) but also in the content as a header (bingo). There’s also the meta keyword of “date” being used, possibly enforcing it more, and then, as you mentioned, constantly being linked to from Sitepoint. Makes sense to me. Perhaps it is “just wrong”, but I think it’s being indexed properly.
November 7th, 2006 at 1:31 am
Huh?
Sorry – double negative.
What I meant to say was, through having a gmail account, http://www.google.com shows me logged in, and from second hand sources like this http://www.seroundtable.com/archives/003477.html, when I am logged in, Google may be personalizing the results I get. I hope they’re not also doing something IP based.
Fair enough I guess.
November 7th, 2006 at 7:46 am
But, what if webtuesday have some relevance. Google find group of “just” 67 000 000 pages with some date, then pages with date in header, heading and title put closer to top, then take site relevance etc, etc,… This is not wrong. Therećs algorithm, and therećs results that follows rules of algorithm. If this is not what we naturally do, then we have oprtunity to get deeper look in googles algorithm. Any violation of common sense can give us information how the system work
November 13th, 2006 at 7:46 pm