Just don't get it

April 5th, 2004, 12:52 pm

Newbie here, so don't flame me too bad if I'm breaking any rules.

Try this search in Google: march madness

Someone PLEASE explain to me how the #5 ranked page out of 2,480,000 is this one:

http://www.provide.net/~brewpaul/

About to pull out what's left of my hair!!!

April 5th, 2004, 12:57 pm

It has a DMOZ listning with that keyprhaze in it!
http://dmoz.org/Sports/Basketball/Fan_Pages/

[vetofunk]

April 5th, 2004, 12:59 pm

His PageRank is very high and if you look at his cached site, that term is only found on links pointing to his site. I am guessing he has dozens of sites pointing to him with the term "march madness" in the anchor text. These two mixed together can get you to great positioning.

An example:
Search for "miserable failure"

You think the #1 site has that term in any part of the site?....no.
Its all because of incoming links and high Pagerank.

April 5th, 2004, 1:15 pm

Thanks for your responses.

OK, I understand that DMOZ listings can greatly affect rankings. However, the page has nothing to do with March Madness. No text. No meta. No links. NO NOTHING.

The last time it did (according to archive.org) was Nov. of 1992. So is Google ignoring the irrelevance of the page when crawling it and just defaulting to the fact that its on DMOZ?

[vetofunk]

April 5th, 2004, 1:17 pm

You can always report to DMOZ that this page has nothing do to with March Madness and is password protected.

You should be able to do this at http://www.resource-zone.com.

April 5th, 2004, 6:38 pm

Wow...This guy is doing this on only 4 links with march madness in every one of them.... No links in yahoo, msn, or alta vista. My guess is this is a product of being part of a larger domain http://www.provide.net has over 1500 pages in the google index.

April 5th, 2004, 8:47 pm

Whatever it is, it is the biggest hole in Google's algorithm I've seen. A shame and enough to get me more bitter than I already am.

Any other thoughts?

April 5th, 2004, 8:49 pm

Hey, we should stat up a site...

"Things that suck about Google"....

Get everybody linking to it with the anchor text "Google"... See if we can out-do them on their own search

April 6th, 2004, 1:52 am

Grogger wrote:

OK, I understand that DMOZ listings can greatly affect rankings.

This is not true. The PR you get from a DMOZ page eg:4 is the same value as a link from another PR4 site. If it Google did this would then be "Hilltop” and that’s not implemented by Google yet.

The only way a DMOZ listing is greater than another is when other websites use DMOZ to power a directory but when they do the PR is most often below 4 and would not show up in back links and any ranking boost is small.

April 6th, 2004, 5:50 am

Johan007,

If it's not the case, how do you explain that ranking?

April 6th, 2004, 6:30 am

cos of DMOZ...

However what I am saying is that if another site eg: yours was to link to it via:

2 PR 7 links with the link text of your search term
2 PR 4 links with the link text of your search term

then it should* equal it.

*some smaller PR links may be hidden from the back links and they may or may not have an effect on ranking.

You can start by adding a small signature link to in forums (though they have know to be suddenly devalued from sites like phpbb so don’t rely on them)

[vetofunk]

April 6th, 2004, 7:27 am

Then again, he may have 200 PR3 links from 200 other sites all with that term in the anchor text. With, DMOZ...the PR from DMOZ does not carry anymore weight than any other site, but the category you are listed in DMOZ can greatly effect your positioning, at least what I have experienced.

April 6th, 2004, 10:18 am

Hey vetofunk....tell us more about the effect of the category you choose in DMOZ.....please!

April 6th, 2004, 10:31 am

March Madness is an usual phrase so there are probably not many sites optimised for that phrase.

But a lot may have a mention of it on them, hence the 2,5m listing on Google.

Clare

[vetofunk]

April 6th, 2004, 10:42 am

Well its nothing that I have concrete evidence of, but I have read opinions in the past that Google uses DMOZ category information to compare with your site to better position your site in Google. When Google would place the directory link under your site in their serps, I noticed that the top positions were always in a similiar category in DMOZ. It is a good idea if you think about it. This way, it helps Google find out what is spam and what is actually a relevant site. When I go looking to submit links to sites, I always check what sites are in my DMOZ category and which ones are in similiar categories.

This all has just been my experience. Most people do this anyway. Bottom line is that you should always submit your site to the most relevant category in DMOZ.