Among the Top Ten Google Search Results

A few years ago a CEO asked me how I was able to beat her entire company and any other mention of her on the Google searches with a single blog entry on my other (Danish) blog that wasn't too flattering as it was a powerful (but civil) retort against an interview she had given in a local newspaper.

I didn't reply to neither her question nor her invitation to come by for a chat in case I happened to be in town, primarily because I didn't feel like debating the issue with her. It seemed to me that she would just repeat her request to have the entry removed. I also refrained from mentioning to her that I was very often in town, and that in fact I happened to work just one level downstairs in the same building as her company.

I did wonder why I'd be the top search match on Google, though. There were no links to the blog entry from other pages. I think my blog had a reasonable page rank for a somewhat obscure blog at that time, but her company name and her own name could hardly have been less known on Google than my blog.

Even today the pages on my other blog are found much higher on the Google search results than I'd imagine. None of the usual explanations about page ranking algorithms seem to apply. I never even paid attention to keywords or "tags" for my entries. What do my entries have that other entries don't have?

Okay, I presume my entries have the envy of a few bloggers and the resentment of at least one CEO out there, but that's not what I meant.

I don't have the answer to what my entries have, but I do have a few observations on what top Google search results don't have that my high scoring entries also don't have.

• Pornography. Granted, many of the search phrases seem to concentrate on just that, and several of my blog entries do contain phrases that could have sexual connotations causing the search hits. (I suppose that by writing entries that are reached by searches for sexual content, perhaps I should reconsider my mental health according to Freudian theory.) There's no explicit sexual content in the top search results, however, but hints are fine, and people appear to search for that.
  
• Illegal software. Microsoft does seem to consider any software not written by Microsoft to be of dubious nature and approaches open-source software as criminal activity, but this trend probably hasn't caught on at Google. Downright illegal software, or "warez," doesn't seem to reach the top of the searches, though. (Speaking of Freudian, what is one to think of a person's libido if he calls his company micro-soft?)
• Bad grammar and spelling. Do a Google search for something, and check the top results for language quality. There are few spelling and grammar mistakes. (You may now add "anal" to my use of Freudian theory on blog content.)
• The entry is short. (Er, let's just stop mentioning Freud now.) Most entries appearing in Google searches have a reasonable length. Terse comments don't show in the search results unless you're searching for a unique phrase that is found only in a short note.
  
• Unconventional terminology. If the article uses the same field-specific terms in the discussion of a topic as other articles, the article can draw some authority from field conventions. It would be fair to assume that an article is not relevant if it uses terms that are absent in most other articles discussing that topic. The ability to use correct terminology probably correlates with the ability to write reasonably lenghty articles, so maybe this is sheer coincidence from a Google search point of view.

The general picture is that a Google search may not yield what you were looking for, but Google searches rarely return material that would rate as complete junk to an intelligent mind.

I'm sure that Google suppresses web pages with pornographic or evidently illegal content, but in addition to that I suspect that Google applies some content analysis algorithms that benchmark the language quality and content coverage of the articles when the articles are sorted for relevance. I haven't been able to verify this suspicion, but it does appear that top search results do share some quality characteristics.

In the above is even remotely true, then the corollary is clear: to make your entries come up early in the Google searches, make sure they're well-written, of reasonable length, and that they apply proper terminology as applicable to the topic. And, make sure to add some Freudian slips to your content, making sure that when you say one thing, you mean your mother.