Some broad Google searches rank recent Metamodern posts high or even first among tens of thousands to millions of returns. For example, this post is currently ranked as the #1 page for [ photonics technologies ], above “nature supplement: photonics technologies” (from the journal Nature) and “PHOTONICS TECHONLOGIES: Home Page” (from the company Photonics Technologies). I’m puzzled. Yesterday’s data:
| Search Terms | Rank, Returns | Post | |
| photonics technologies | 1 | 512,000 | Real (Photonics) Technologies |
| computation proof | 3 | 3,840,000 | Computation and Mathematical Proof |
| molecular foundry | 6 | 76,900 | Molecular Foundry Seminar |
| peptoids | 6 | 28,000 | Peptoids at the Molecular Foundry |
| condensed matter physics | 24 | 1,210,000 | Condensed-Matter Physics Condensed |
| black swans | 34 | 4,090,000 | Black Swans |
| world philosophy | 36 | 20,500,000 | Reflections on Popper on World Philosophy Day |
| scientific method | 121 | 16,400,000 | The Data Explosion and the Scientific Method |
I won’t complain, but these high rankings make no sense to me. I used an anonymizer, too, and a friend checked the results from a different IP address. Can someone please explain this?
{ 9 comments }
Vladimir Nesov 12.23.08 at 10:11 pm UTC
There is some balance with how recent a post is.
brian wang 12.23.08 at 10:34 pm UTC
Plus you have used the keywords in the title and in the body. While ones below that only have it in a tag or somwhere in the body. When you used compound words, they appear close together in your article. While in ones below you they are scattered which indicates that the page is not really about that topic.
It is more clear with peptoids. A more rare word. That the ones after you do not have title / body dual appearance of the word. Then it becomes how frequently the word appears, but not too frequent so that it is spamming.
No one is optimizing for those words and phrases because they do not appear often enough in searches relative to the number of pages. Thus Google is able to achieve a pure ranking that is not skewed by optimization for search engine optimization purposes. There are actually not that many real pages exactly on the topics that you have listed.
Scientific method I think has articles with that in the title and body but them many more are pdf or something or considered aged or which do not have any inbound links. Your site has about 30+ inbound links which gives an overall authority to it. Plus the inbound links are from sites with high google rank authority in the topic areas (foresight, netbigfuture, CRN and others)
L. F. Somogyi 12.24.08 at 12:42 am UTC
My guess is that you are considered highly credible and have been assigned a high ranking, most likely by a human providing input to the automated ranking results, based on your prior published works and references to you by other highly credible individuals, and in other publications and websites that are also considered highly credible.
Bill Mill 12.24.08 at 4:07 am UTC
You’ve been linked to by many high credibility (~= pagerank) sites, therefore your site is given a high credibility itself.
Joshua Riley Simmons 12.24.08 at 7:28 pm UTC
All of the comments above offer legitimate possibilities — I think all of those things factor in.
An aside, however; I recently saw a blog post in my Google Reader which remarked on the high ranks of blog posts within Google’s Search Results. I think Google pushes blogs up in the rankings by merit of relevancy, recency, and authority.
Paul Hughes 12.26.08 at 1:02 pm UTC
I think a more likely explanation than human intervention are numerous recent mentions in the blogosphere. There are many weighted variables in Google’s algorithms, but one of the most relevant are *recent* mentions and incoming links.
Michael G.R. 12.28.08 at 7:13 am UTC
My first guess is that because this blog was linked by a bunch of others ones (including mine) as soon as it appeared and because the ‘keyword cloud’ that it contains is fairly specialized, that it easily beats many other sites that aren’t nearly as well linked.
f.ex. This blog certainly has more inbound links from other sites that have high authority than the company site for Photonics Technologies.
Nex6 12.29.08 at 8:01 pm UTC
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=link%3Ahttp%3A%2F%2Fmetamodern.com&aq=f&oq=
you have 261 sites linking to you. that helps the rankings, also the content is good and welformed as posters said above.
-Nex6
Mike 01.07.09 at 5:32 pm UTC
For the phrase “photonics technology”, neither photonicstechnologies.com nor “nature photonics technologies” have anyone linking to them (except for your own link to them in this specific post). So you merely outrank them because your post about “photonic technologies” has more links pointing to it.
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