My site is listing well in Google - sometimes!

Searching for "London Scuba Club" puts me on the first page.

Searching for "London Diving Club" puts me in the number two spot on
the first page.

Searching for "London Scuba Diving Club"? Well i got bored looking
after page 12. Other site get far higher ranking - even though by page
11 of the results their irrelevance is plain.

How can this be? The title of the site is "London Hellfins Scuba
Diving Club" and all of the keywords appear near the top of the page
several times over and in the meta tags.

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Request for Question Clarification by robertskelton-ga on 01 Dec 2002 18:12 PST

It certainly is a mystery. Do you use any program (like Web Position
Gold) to check your ranking for "London Scuba Diving Club", and not
the other phrases?

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Clarification of Question by sidlothian-ga on 02 Dec 2002 01:27 PST

No, I'm not using anything like Web Position Gold - just trying out a
few manually.

Interestingly (having read gwagner-ga's comment) my site appears to
have no backward links either...

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Request for Question Clarification by gwagner-ga on 03 Dec 2002 22:40 PST

Having no backward links (i.e. searching for "link:yoursite.com"
returning no pages) only means that your site is pretty new to the
google index. Based on my experience with a couple of my own sites, it
took anywhere from 2 go 8 weeks for google to list the site at all
after adding it through ://www.google.com/addurl.html and another
few weeks for "related:yoursite.com" and "link:yoursite.com" to work.

gwagner-ga

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Clarification of Question by sidlothian-ga on 04 Dec 2002 00:40 PST

The site's been listed on google for at least six months now.

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Request for Question Clarification by gwagner-ga on 04 Dec 2002 08:25 PST

This gets weirder and weirder. The one thing I can think of is if you
could contact help@google.com and ask let them know about all this. It
really sounds more and more like some sort of bug in the system and
I'm sure they'd be thankful to figure out things like that.

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Request for Question Clarification by gwagner-ga on 15 Dec 2002 19:19 PST

Hi Sidlothian,
 
It's me again. One more quick suggestion: instead of emailing
help@google.com, I'd suggest searching for "London Scuba Diving Club".
Then scroll down all the way to the bottom and click on "Help us
improve." That way you'll be able to send more direct feedback to
Google.
 
Good luck!
gwagner-ga

Hi sidlothian,

One possible explanation I could come up with is that Google's main
ranking criterion is who links to you in what ways, not which keywords
you have on your site (://www.google.com/webmasters/4.html). In
other words, if other sites have the phrases "London Scuba Club" and
"London Diving Club" with hyperlinks to your site, but there is no
site anywhere on the web that links to your site through the phrase
"London Scuba Diving Club" it might very well be that searching for
the first two terms ranks your page higher than searching for the
third one.

That said, this phenomenon is still pretty strange, since searching
for "London Scuba Diving Club" in quotation marks lists your site on
the first page, searching for the same term without quotation marks
lists it somewhere around site #145, while listing
www.zeal.com/zealist/websites_newest.jhtml advertising your site as
#20. Pretty strange indeed.

Sorry, but unfortunately I can't explain this phenomenon either.

gwagner-ga

Hi Sid,

One of the things I notice is the lack of keywords you use, maybe
won't lift you but it's worth doing.