by Mark Mason on October 28, 2010
One of the major challenges of being a part time internet entrepreneur, at least as far as I’m concerned, is managing multiple projects.
My confession to you is that after getting off to a pretty good start on the Niche Site Duel I have completely ignored since my last update two months ago. Of course, this is not surprising. Having a full time job and a part time internet business in addition to four kids and a beautiful wife leaves me pretty busy.
In my last report we were talking about how amazing it was that the site (for no apparent reason) was ranking on the first page of Google for the keyword I had selected, "learn guitar basics." At the time I mentioned that I felt like this was part of the rank and tank phenomenon common with blogs.
Often times when you start a new blog it will go to the top of the rankings briefly only to fall later. My theory on this is that Google very briefly gives a lot of weight to brand new content on the internet to see if it will go viral in terms of backlinks. If this doesn’t happen Google will drop the site out of the rankings.
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by Mark E. Mason on October 27, 2008
One thing I know for sure about Google search engine rankings is that it is just about impossible to know anything for sure about Google search engine rankings. Sometimes, it's good to know what you don't know.
How Google decides what websites appear on the front page for any particular search term is like the formula for Coke or the recipe for Kentucky Fried Chicken -- it's a secret. We know Coke has caramel in it, but the exact recipe is classified. The difference between Coke and Google is that the formula for Coke never changes (they tried that once -- what a disaster). In fact, the formula for Google SERPs is changing periodically as Google works to improve the experience for end users.
Of course, what you hear all the time on blogs just like this one are "stories" about what people did on their web site for their keywords that resulted in page one rankings. I call this anecdotal evidence. It's usually very interesting, but it is almost never conclusive. Just because someone got a page one ranking by including their keywords in the footer of their pages in flashing pink with a blue background, does not mean that you will get the same result.
So, let me tell you an anecdote about Google page rank. Read the Full Article →
