It Might Help the Search Rankings November 24, 2008

It Might Help the Search Rankings

By Guest Contributor
November 24, 2008

Google is still not a fan of this site, but there’s a quick way that may help raise this site’s ranking.

I’m paraphrasing what reader Tokenadult wrote to me.

Essentially, search for “Friendly Atheist” on Google and find this site — it was on page 4 for me.

If you’re logged into Google, you have a chance to click on the “up arrow” next to the result. You can bring this site to the first page of your results.

tokenadult says this may “eventually educate Google’s search results”

Worth a shot, and it’s not a lot of work 🙂

Thanks in advance.

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  • Ken McKnight

    Done and done.

  • N

    Done. Hope it helps, Hemant. I love and appreciate your site.

  • Richard Wade

    What the heck?! I Googled Friendly Atheist and this site was the 38th entry! The previous ones were sites that list blogs mentioning this one, atheist’s personal blogs that have articles about this one, or articles about “friendly atheism” in general. Why isn’t Hemant’s site the very first entry?

    Google is still not a fan of this site,

    Waddaya mean “not a fan of this site”?

  • Tom

    Call me a skeptic, but…

    The changes you make only affect your own searches. Google Blog

  • You get more hits if more people link to your site from their own pages. I put your link on my blog under “suggested reading”. Not that I get a lot of hits, but still. Every little helps, right?

  • Done. I’ve also linked to your site from my blog. Hope it helps.

  • Becky

    Done 🙂

  • Sandra

    Done… on a side note iGoogle has a widget that links to your blog. So someone, somewhere in google land likes you.

  • Michael

    I believe that it helps if more people link the phrase “Friendly Atheist” from their site.

  • I did it, but are you sure it would help? Last time, several people suggested that you had somehow been marked as “suspicious” by google, and that’s why your rank is so low. If that’s what it is, I’m not sure if this would fix it.

  • Stephen P

    One other thing you could do is tidy up the syntax of the site. A validator, e.g. validator.w3.org can show you the errors. For example, you seem to have a couple of weird characters before your meta elements.

    While Google will try to cope with invalid syntax (it has to, given the appalling mess that many sites are in), that involves quite a bit of guesswork, and you never know what it might choke on.

  • Lionel L.

    The first site in the listing has a title “Friendly Atheists?” but the URL is Infidels dot com

    So… Just know what you are clicking on when you click it is all I have to say about this.

  • Done! I’d always wondered whether it was just me who had problems searching for your website using google.

  • As far as I am aware, the up arrow only helps your own personalized results. Google haven’t got any plans to use the system overall because it would override their PageRank system, and it would be easily abused (as this post demonstrates :P).

  • The Man Version

    Hemant, take a look at skeptools.com. It’s run by a friend of mine, and there is information in there about Google rankings.

    We’ve been going through something similar, with StopSylviaBrowne being taken over by a woo when Robert Lancaster let it lapse because he had a stroke. We’ve been working to get http://www.stopsylvia.com (the new URL) back up in the Google ranks so people have the right site for anything about Sylvia Browne.

    (Seems to be working, too. The new site is up to #6.)

  • Dan C.

    Trying to game or rig the Google ranking system (as you’re trying to do here) usually backfires, often in the form of them docking your rating or removing you from search results entirely.

    Google has extensive documentation and hints for webmasters, but the Wikipedia page might be more helpful: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PageRank

    Hope this helps.

  • done.

  • Lindsey

    I don’t know if this has been mentioned before, but one thing I noticed is your load time. I did a quick load time test on submitplus.com and for someone with dial-up, it takes almost 2 minutes for your page to load. Decreasing your load time might help you move up the list a little anyway!

  • I noticed this, as well, but I didn’t realize there was a way to help correct Google’s incompetence. I’ll make a hasty journey over to Google to try to boost your rating.

    A simpler way to accomplish a high rating would be to call yourself “The Amish Computerized Android Who Wears Underwear Atheist”. I’m pretty sure there aren’t too many of those.

  • Pentimento

    That won’t work but try these tips from a fellow Atheist whose site is always number one during a search for “atheism blogs”.

    http://www.atheistrev.com/search/label/Blogging

    Here is an article about Google bombing, as well.

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_bomb