July 2nd, 2008
Why Are These Blog Posts So High in Google?
I was checking through the site logs this morning, and I noticed that I was getting a lot of traffic on two phrases in particular. At least at the time of this writing, I have a post from this blog at the number two spot in Google’s search results for both talking to clients and audit trail database. I’m no expert in deciphering search engine algorithms, but here’s me talking out loud as I try to understand why I’m occupying such a high spot on these terms.
Competition
I don’t know that a lot of people specifically target these phrases as part of their search engine marketing strategies. A lot of people do seem to stumble onto these phrases by accident, though. “Audit trail database” has 745,000 results, and “talking to clients” has over 27 million.
Age of Page
The first thing I notice is that both of these posts are from 2006. I haven’t tried to determine how old some of the other pages in the search results are, but I would assume a lot of them have to be more than 2 years old.
Social Networking
As far as I know neither of these pages has ever received any serious traffic from a social networking site. Truthfully, I haven’t paid as much attention to social networking as I probably should. The advantage here, though, is that I can at least eliminate one of the many variables that go into search ranking.
Holy Cow
I just noticed that my database audit trail post ranks ahead of the Wikipedia page for “Database audit”.
Comments
Both of these posts have comments, but only one or two. Certainly not enough that the amount of content on the page is higher than most of my posts. Actually the database post is unusually long, but the clients post is one of my shorter ones.
Internal Links
The clients post just has one internal link showing up in Google’s index. The database post has a ton of internal links and one inbound link from a blog carnival.
Conclusions
I’m not sure I have any. The fact that both pages are from 2006 is probably a big factor, in which case my search traffic should just continue to rise as my archives get older and older. Any readers have any possible explanations for my freakish good fortune? Is Google in the middle of a big update?
Special thanks to GoogleFont.com for the “Lucky?” image.
