wouter van ooijen voti.nl> writes: > > I think that there are a lot of exceptions that confirm the > > rule. The rule is that getting a site with 'usual' content > > into a reasonable position is nearly impossible without > > 'magic' involving Ben Franklin effigies changing hands. > > A 'nearly' claim is difficult to debunk, but my site (www.voti.nl) seems > to end up quite satisfactory in google searches. I did not pay anyone > for that. Nearly means that from about 20 people I interviewed/queried about this over some time about 3 or 4 said they had no trouble being ranked w/o effort. My own homepages appeared 'by themselves' over time (I did not bother to register them), but a commercial site took more than two months to 'move' (and it was the kind with paid adwords and all that). > IMHO there is only one real way to end up high on google: (relevant) > content. Relevant to what ? To a tech search for parts ? Do you compare the content of your site with that of Mouser, Newark, National, etc ? Surely you can see that those sites are more relevant,and for content (as in tech articles), there are a lot more out there. Having a unique name helps, however. > > So, one can say that it costs money to get ranked > > unless one has some really desirable commodity. > > Correct, and rightly so. That commodity is content. Everyone has at least as much content as you have. Do a query on usual terms and see what comes up in the word rankings (for each word in the search). Having a lot of links to your page from other places on the web should help. F.ex. I don't know how Google handles signatures on archived discussion lists which invariably contain URLs in .sigs . With a regular poster there should be tens of thousands of individual archive pages, each different, each hosted on Google proper, and each containing a link to the business URL. Does it matter ? I don't know. Example: Piclist archive on Google Groups (read only): http://groups.google.com/group/piclist_archive?lnk=sg&hl=en Searching for voti.nl in the search window on that page brings in 218 results! But the Google score for voti.nl is over 16,000 pages. Do the 218 extras count ? I have no way to know that. Anyway this is not a guessing game, there is a system behind it and it's a system that makes money. So finding excuses for that is imho superfluous. It's just the way it is. Google ranks pages by linked-to. IOW, *other* sites actually rank your pages, by linking to them. And one of the biggest 'optimization' scams that is hard to beat is to ask people to link to your page and you link to them in return. Users don't count. Google has no way to know people clicked on a certain result link in a Google answer page. There is no feedback mechanism built into the links proper (but some statistical correlation may exist wrt. those who click on the cache options of links). So ranking is not by users but by *peers* (and, strangely, users who post on newsgroups or blogs *become* peers, since they generate 'content'). Other sites, not visitors or search keys, determine your ranking, by linking to you. That could also explain why ieee.org etc ranks high: because everyone and their sisters link to the publications (presumably from other papers which *are* searchable - usually papers have a reference list at the bottom and if that uses HTML links it would explain the 'popularity' of those ieee.org $$$pay pages - but not how Google got to index the content). I was involved with deploying (and modifying a little) non-commercial search engines which use 'democratic' searches (i.e. term occurence count indicates relevance), namely htdig. Over about 500MB of technical documents, PDFs and source code, htdig could find what one was looking for ... eventually. It could be on the 20th result page. Looking for a word that could appear several times in a technical description, while the real definition was elsewhere was a particularly bad idea there. So it is not that simple. 'Content' does not work the way you seem to think it does, there is a lot of 'something else' involved. Google says as much about it, but this discussion is about the something turning slowly but inexorably ultra-commercial (with some exceptions). And not all of it seems to be Google's doing (i.e. page rank 'optimizers' pitch in hard here). Peter P. -- http://www.piclist.com PIC/SX FAQ & list archive View/change your membership options at http://mailman.mit.edu/mailman/listinfo/piclist