I mentioned in an earlier article about Google incorporating Hot topics and Hot search ‘feeds’ in its main search pages.  I Googled Jeff Bridges just as he was being interviewed by Jonathan Ross and I noticed Google was feeding in real time data to the search page asynchronously(without me refreshing the page).  While this method in itself is not in itself ground breaking, the fact that Google is paying more and more attention to what is happening in the Social Media networks came as a bit of asurprise.  It will be interesting to see how this develops in the coming weeks and months -if  this becomes more of a feature in the listings we will need to think seriously about the format of content, and as mentioned in previous posts, increasingly moving our focus to Social Media channels like Twitter, Facebook etc.

No content – BUT high listing

The second surprise in My Googling  this week came right out of the blue, and it was one I should have perhaps been aware of. The scenario : when you can actually do a search for a key word/phrase and you’re ousted in the position listings by a site that not only does not have the key word or phrase on their page, they don’t even have their site indexed by Google.  Please feel free to contradict me at this point because  (in the words of V. Meldrew) I didn’t really believe it either. There was no actual site page content in the Google listings excerpt either.

The person that actually came across this was scratching his head over this one as well. Could Adword keywords perhaps be affecting the natural rankings perhaps?

If you haven’t already guessed the answer by now here it is – backlinks or inbound links, external links or whatever other terms are used to describe a link to your site coming from an external site’s page.

More surprisingly perhaps was the ‘potency’ of the anchor text, i.e., the textual key word/phrase being used in the  link itself.  Further investigation revealed that the external links pointing to the site numbered in their thousands.

Now two  interesting implications follow:

• A site content doesn’t even have to be actually indexed to be ranked highly in the natural listings, furthermore:
• A site can have its robots text file configured to ‘no index, no follow’   – in other words specifically telling the search engines NOT to list the site, and yet it still appears in searches, (albeit minus any content)

Mmm…. is  there something discrete in the Google algorithm that enables sites to be ranked regardless of page content? Is it configured in such a way to place to simply ignore content and carry on regardless and use the backlink anchor text instead? The example in my next post should hopefully go some way to restoring my confidence in natural listings.

Am I stating the obvious?..  in the meantime feel free to add your pearls of wisdom

(all comments are moderated BTW)