Search Engine Optimization - Webmaster Blog

A nice keyword experiment

This little experiment might shed some light on the basic principles how google ranks pages according to keywords. That is: "Some light" since the google ranking algorithms are complex and often not even known - but it should give a very basic idea about the principles of ranking in a google search.

You can go on any social bookmarking site like www.digg.com, www.netscape.com or similiar and try that for yourself...i did the experiment on Google Notebook.

Hint, Hint: Backlinks on Google Notebook... It's a link right off google.com... :)

I picked a made-up nonsense keyword which had (guess it) 0 results on google since this word didnt exist.

I added a link to the notebook to www.yahoo.com with the nonsense word as anchor-text. Just create a new entry with your nonsense word and put a link in it.

A few days later a google-search for the nonsense-keyword indeed showed up in #1 in Google for my Google Notebook - and the #2 entry was www.yahoo.com

1) My own notebook page #1 in Google for this keyword since it contained the keyword, so it showed up as first result in the search results.

2) (Yahoo) Was shown for the keyword as #2 since my link on my site pointed to yahoo with the keyword as anchor text.

Conclusion

Note how the ranking/search results are not only affected by your own content/keywords on your site...but also the anchors other sites use to link to a nother web site. Yahoo for sure doesn't have any mentioning of "grlztgrsths grgzmmf" anywhere on their site...but it was seen in Google since i linked to it using that term :)

Georg

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