The magazine of the Melbourne PC User Group
Editorial
Ash Nallawalla
ash@melbpc.org.au

I feel sad, deflated, dejected, rejected, discarded. No, it has nothing to do with job hunting or family and friends - it's that other "friend" - Google to be exact.

For some reason I visited the Google newsgroup called google.public.support.general. You can only reach it with a Web browser. Start at http://groups.google.com and type google.public.support.general, which will take you to a link to this newsgroup. I read about optimising Web pages - something I had neglected for a long time.

If you download and install the Google Toolbar http://toolbar.google.com, you can see each Web page's Google ranking on a scale of 0 to 10. Melb PC's external page gets a respectable 6/10, as does my list of user groups. Microsoft and Google get 10/10.

Many pages rise to the top of the rankings because they have excellent content and, therefore, numerous other sites link to it. If those other sites have a ranking of 4/10 or greater, then their "greatness" rubs off on the linked page.


Temporary jubilation.

Cloud Nine, Then Down

My new site crm911.com was based on a technical deception, albeit innocent. It lived on the same virtual machine as http://easyrsvp.com, so typing either URL took you to the same page. The latter domain was in Yahoo and major directories when everything was free, and the popularity of my user group listing http://easyrsvp.com/ugotw ensured that hundreds of sites linked to it. The latter is ranked 6/10. I was tired of the old domain and wanted to retire it. Unfortunately, Google thinks that two domains sharing one machine is a sneaky practice and it demotes them.

Having smartened up my new site and rearranged key words, I was gob-smacked to find that the words "crm consultant" showed me as the first two hits in Google's results on the first page. I was elated and told a few people, including many that didn't need to know. I congratulated myself on my rank-enhancing skills.

A few days later, I found that my pages were no longer on that first page - they could have been several hundred pages deep, or worse. That is when doom and gloom set in. How were potential clients going to find me? I was convinced that Google had discovered my deception and banished me.

Freshbot Effect

The Google newsgroup experts told me to relax (easy for them to say, I thought) and that this was a "normal" occurrence. There is a "Freshbot" effect, I was told, whereby new pages are temporarily taken to the top of the list so that searchers can see them. One presumes that this is a short opportunity to attract visitors and that Google makes note of that, before deciding where to park you in the long term.

New Web Host

I sweated for a few days while I was off Google's radar, then bought space at a new host for http://crm911.com. That's a story in itself, but I needed to be free of Google's suspicion. I placed some .htaccess 301 redirects (look them up in Google) at some of the http:// easyrsvp.com pages I was moving to the new home.


Back to a high ranking.

The good news is that I am back in Google's favour, at least for now, and back in the top 10.

Reprinted from the March 2003 issue of PC Update, the magazine of Melbourne PC User Group, Australia

[ About Melbourne PC User Group ]