[thelist] Re: Search Engine Hell

[Marcia Welter]

 >I have a site on Tripod, with no other websites
referencing me.  And, I got listed on Tripod.  Granted, I was not
at the top (about #25).  Then, I experimented and had my secondary
pages reference back to the main page.  Well, guess what.  I am
now listed as number 2 by Google.

Jack, there is a link - check your guestbook, one of the entries mentions
one. And there may be others - links with less than PR4 have not been
showing from what I've seen - maybe I just haven't found any when looking.

Thing is, having a site pulled up at Google by name is not the same as
ranking for levels of competitive keyphrases. A critically important factor
in getting found on searches people do when they're looking for things is
page rank - and to be honest, I've not seen any pages in the first 10 search
results with a page rank of less than 4.

Even sites with the latest phenomenon, zero page rank whiich is a penalty,
can be found by searching for their domain name, but when all their page
rank is stripped, for getting rankings they're toast. It's not only being in
the database, because those sites are, but how a site is ranking in keywords
so it'll get some traffic.

When doing search engine placement for a client, unless they're clueless
altogether (like some I've known) and don't check stats or logs, you've got
to show them something tangible in the way of ranking for keywords and/or
traffic.

Marcia
http://www.welterweb.com