My web site is still very new and I haven't made any real effort to publicize it as yet, mainly because I'd like to polish up the design, add more content, and get on a regular blogging schedule before inviting the hordes to descend.
That said, I'm rather mystified that I'm getting as much traffic as I am--almost all of it via searches done at Google and its affiliates. Since the traffic is merely a handful or so visitors a day, I have the time to analyze it a bit.
Some of it is to be expected; the most popular search terms that drive people to my site revolve around some combination of 1776 and musical, with or without some additional qualifying terms. That's fine because I have a couple pages devoted to the musical 1776.
Some is a bit surprising; the single most popular search term that brings traffic to one of my pages is king syrup. Go figure.
I've seen visitors who had apparently waded through 140 or more items in their search results in order to find me. (Hey, thanks, whoever you persistent folks are!) But what confuses me are the search terms that cause a page on my site to rank fairly high up in the rankings.
You see, I've been led to believe that one of the most important criteria that Google uses to rank sites is the number of other pages that link to them. By that criterion, I should be just about dead last, because at last count, practically nobody was linking to my site yet.
So I was surprised a few weeks ago to see that my little riff on Maria Bartiromo and her alleged conflicts of interest had gotten such a high ranking from Google (at one point it was number one on a search of Maria Bartiromo Citigroup). But perhaps that could be explained as a "news" type of item; my site benefited by having an entry on a somewhat topical subject.
That doesn't explain the phenomenon that I just saw, however. Do a search on Ken Jennings actor and I'm number one of over 7000! Now a lot of those other 7000 sites are very well established sites with lots of other sites hyper-linking to them. And yet my little interview with Ken Jennings comes up number one.
How to explain it? I can't. I haven't a clue. I can, however, speculate, and that's all this is at this point. I'm a member of Google's AdSense program, meaning that I run ads for Google's advertisers on my pages. Do you think that Google gives a boost to those sites that run its ads?
No? Didn't think so.
NB Obviously Google's page rankings aren't static. What ranks high today may be low tomorow. So if you try to replicate the results that I've described, I can't promise that you'll see what I'm seeing now.
Update: I've reconsidered and now have another theory as to why some of my pages rank so high.
Posted by jt at September 10, 2003 05:24 PMHow do I get my site on the first google page?
Posted by: Anita Tevis-Long at October 6, 2003 10:45 AM