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A Question For All You Google Experts Out There
By JLP | September 5, 2007
Okay, there’s something I can’t figure out.
Back in July I wrote a post titled “Should You Buy Longevity Insurance?” When I Google that title, my post doesn’t show up until four pages deep into the search results. Yet, Nickel’s post, which doesn’t even match the my title exactly, shows up at number one.
Can anyone tell me why this is? Am I doing something wrong? Any Google employees out there than can help me? LOL! I’m not looking for special treatment. I just want my posts to show up in search results.
Topics: Blogging | 13 Comments »
September 5th, 2007 at 4:21 pm
Something like that is weighted by many factors, you can use googlerankings.com to do some research on the issue. There’s quite a few handy links to tools and such towards the bottom.
September 5th, 2007 at 4:36 pm
My understanding of Google’s algorithm is that any number of things have an impact on how high any particular page is ranked. One of those things is the number of other pages that link to the page in question, so maybe more people have linked to Nickel’s post than to yours? Sometimes it also has to do with the number of times the words are used in the metadata associated with the page. There are other reasons, I know, but those are the two that come most readily to mind.
The business of getting pages to the top of search engine results can be lucrative, I think–it’s called search engine optimization. My brother used to work for one of those companies, until it went under…so maybe it’s not *that* lucrative.
September 5th, 2007 at 4:44 pm
Hi,
I’m not a Google expert, but here are some thoughts from looking at the Google results pages.
The listing for your site is actually pointing to one of your Wordpress category pages (http://allfinancialmatters.com/category/retirement-planning/) rather than the post itself. It can sometimes be a good idea to disallow search engines to index the category pages if they rank better than the actual posts. There could be knock on effects, so be careful doing this.
Your category pages also display the full post – so Google may be ranking your established category page higher and could see the individual post as duplicate content. Could be worth just putting excerpts on the category page rather than the full post.
Just one other thing, which might not have a massive effect – it might be worth moving the title of the post to the start of the HTML title tag, rather than having AllFinancial Matters > Blog Archive in front of all titles. Might give the title a bit more weight in the search engine, plus might make it more obvious to the visitor what page they’re on.
Hope that helps,
Rob
September 5th, 2007 at 6:49 pm
It is ranking #1 for me.
September 5th, 2007 at 7:17 pm
Yep, it’s #1 for me now as well. It seems that Google loves you again
.
I’ve had the problem that Money Watch said and the fix seemed to be to stop the indexing of the category pages.
September 5th, 2007 at 8:27 pm
I just Googled it, and this post ranked #1.
September 6th, 2007 at 3:32 am
Factors are #1…
PR of your site compared to nickels… google does not rate your site based on the title, its the page content. If you search google NOW, you should be #1
September 6th, 2007 at 3:38 am
A reason for this would be this post… you have linked to it from your main page giving the original post a slightly higher PR, so when google crawled your site today, they had re crawled the original post you had linked to.
September 6th, 2007 at 4:32 am
this article referencing the original article, not the original article, is linking #1 in google at the moment. since nickel’s article was written aug 29 and your original 1jul, there you have it.
September 6th, 2007 at 6:53 am
Also, your google search just has the phrase in there. So, google is searching each individual word. I tried when you first posted this and putting it in quotes (so it searched the exact phrase “Should You Buy Longevity Insurance”) and it came up #1. Having more instances of subphrases helps
i.e. “Longevity Insurance”, “buy insurance”
September 6th, 2007 at 9:47 am
Four pages deep isn’t really that bad to begin with … can’t be number one all the time. Looks like this post has helped, though…I’d be more likely to search on “Longevity Insurance”, anyway…where does that post fall in those results?
September 6th, 2007 at 9:48 am
I’ll answer my own question … page 2 …
September 8th, 2007 at 1:58 am
you could put these top keywords into h1 header tags and then making sure their font is normal. They’ll still get the benefit of h1 tags but appear normal to the reader.
you can always scour some other stories about the topic and drop your link in there.
You probably already submit your updates to various places, but just in case you don’t pingoat.com is a nice easy service.
i’m sure this repost is what has bumped your ranking and should keep you up there for the time being.