How Does the Google Ranking System Work?

I would really like to know. I take an interest in “optimising” my website so that my posts rank highly for particular search terms. I use WordPress to manage my blog so I thought that might help my ranking. I use a URL structure that I read helps the search engines find relevant posts (I cannot remember where.) The URL structure is http://tjwoodlock/blog/[Post Title]. I use the All in One SEO Plugin and the Google XML Sitemaps Plugin.

I published a post the other day titled Crimen sollicitationis and quite soon after (I can’t remember exactly, but I’m pretty sure it was within a day) it appeared as the tenth highest result on Google for the search term “Crimen sollicitationis.” This was pretty pleasing to me.

So I checked the ranking of my page by doing the same search several times over the following few days. I thought some people might have visited it and improved the rank even higher. But when I checked it a few days ago, not only does my post on Crimen sollicitationis not rank in the top ten results any more, it doesn’t rank at all! It apparently is no longer indexed by Google! I have no idea why this occurred.

This is really unfortunate. I wanted the article to be “out there” on the Internet so that I could have the chance to correct some widespread misconceptions about the subject I was wrote on. Maybe it will get cached again by Google. Maybe it was somehow detected as “cheating” by them (I have no idea why, because I used the same approach I do with all my posts and they are still being indexed by Google and can be readily found with relevant search terms.) Maybe all the footnotes in my post did something. Maybe the several times I re-published the post (in order to try to get the trackbacks to function properly - it still doesn’t) caused some problems. Maybe the page is yet to be indexed at other data centres and will show up again soon. I hope so.

I’ll update things with future posts if something changes. I guess I’m still better off under Google (and Yahoo) than with Live search. Under Live, my site isn’t even indexed at all!

Related Posts

• Crimen sollicitationis and the Media
• Philosophical Assumptions
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