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OT – How Does Google Work?
By JLP | July 24, 2006
I was doing a little research to see how some of my posts were ranking in Google search results. I typed in the word “failure” and here’s what comes up. Yeah, that’s right. The first entry for the word “failure” is a link to President Bush’s page on the WhiteHouse website. Politics aside, how did President Bush’s website become the number one ranked search result for the word “failure” if Google uses search bots to conduct search results?
Topics: Miscellaneous | 5 Comments »
July 24th, 2006 at 11:33 am
This is a few years old news it was caused by the way Google handles links. A lot of blogs started linking to George W. Bush using the words miserable Failure, thus propelling him tothe top of the charts. It’s a result of a decent understanding of how google works.
July 24th, 2006 at 2:01 pm
Google works by figuring out what words people use to link to your website. George W. Bush actually shows up for “miserable failure” as well. Another fun one: hit “I’m feeling lucky” after searching for “French military victories”.
July 24th, 2006 at 6:32 pm
The more important question is why you were searching for ‘failure’ in connection with your own site…
July 25th, 2006 at 9:45 am
Google outlines the basics on their algorithm on their site. As the first post said, Google uses site linking to help determine the importance of a site (ie. how high it ranks on a search). The more sites that link to yours, the higher the rank you get, and it also counts links from highly ranked sites as “more important” than links from low ranked sites. I’ve also read that they penalize you for hidden links and other trickery; with the idea being that one person could own hundreds of non-related domains, and on each put a hidden link to all of the others to attempt to improve their rankings.
July 25th, 2006 at 4:33 pm
JLP – set yourself up with Google sitemaps. It will help you see what your top searches are, etc. For example, checking it just now reveals that Get Rich Slowly averages #4 for “healthiest foods”, #3 for “absurdly cool” (!!!), #10 for “phil town” and “wealthy barber”, etc. Check it out.