Well, thanks to the help of an amazingly generous community, I came pretty darn close to getting to the top of the results for the Nigritude Ultramarine search contest. I'm still kind of astounded at the sheer number of people who chipped in with a link, and I appreciate the help, so I thought I'd figure out what we could have done to get to the top of this contest.
First, there's a small technical issue. My filenames use date and then the "dirified" title of my post. (Dirified just means that it gets rid of any characters or symbols that couldn't appear in a directory name, and then shortens the whole thing about 15 characters.) I did that a while back on my own, but it's the default in Movable Type 3.0 and TypePad, so I wanted to be consistent. Seems like it's pretty future-proof.
But, according to the people who pay attention to such things, Google prefers using hyphens (-) between words in order to separate them in the filename. Words with underscores (_) replacing spaces in filenames don't show up as separate words to Google. Eh, I wasn't gonna try that hard to rig the game. So I just copied my individual archive page to a file named nigritude-ultramarine so Google could pick it up.
(Side note: I've had some people ask me if I think Movable Type should start using hyphens by default for filenames, but I don't think we should start changing a perfectly readable filename just to pander to one search engine. If comment spam is any indication, the engines will evolve to accommodate good content. It's easy enough to change for people who really care, but I personally think permanent, readable URLs is a more important goal than pandering to any single application or search engine.)
My own PageRank is usually around a 7, from what I know (I've been using FireFox for a while, so I can't see the ranking from the Google Toolbar. I guess I could use one of the ranking services to view it.) so I started out in a good place. My site was indexed by Google on Friday just before I put up my contest entry post. If I am right, I think I missed the Googlebot by as little as a few minutes, and so I wasn't picked up again until late last night. I suspect that if I'd have posted on Thursday, I might have won.
However, in addition to PageRank, one of the key measures of relevance is freshness. This I had in spades, by waiting until the end of the contest. All the new inbound links made a big difference in the ranking, I'm sure.
So, I could have posted a day earlier, and changed the filename, and probably made some other tweaks. But the thing that's amazing to me is that I got into somewhere around the Top 50 in a contest with thousands of entrants whose job it is to do this sort of thing. Besides Google having created another accidental market, it's a pretty impressive display of how generous bloggers are, and how we do wield an extraordinary (and disproportionate) amount of power. Well, power in areas like tech and geekery and media and the web. But that's better than being powerful at backgammon or something.
All of this, of course, leads me to my next question. Even though there's a month left before the next part of the contest takes place, can we get everyone with a nigritude ultramarine site to set up a link or redirect to The Hunger Site on their contest entry pages? I bet we could. Certainly wouldn't hurt to try.
Wow, you did get pretty close. With all of the slimy SEOs out there, I’m really surprised that the power of the blog got that close to the top.
I’ve never read before that Google prefers hyphens to underscores. Do you have a link to that? PhotoMatt has mentioned a few times on his site that WordPress does that by default, but I never understood why.
Also, perhaps your links would have worked better if you just used the dirified link without chopping it down to 15. That was really the only problem I noticed when I saw the original posting a few days back. Just having “ultra” in the URL wasn’t quite as effective as having the entire “ultramarine”.
I think it was really interesting (and kind of funny) that Joi Ito wasn’t even participating but appeared just below you in the results.
It’s funny! lol
Actually, you’re showing up as #1 for me right now…
I am seeing the same thing. It seems if the contest had gone on one more day, Anil would have won.
Anil, I don’t want to come across as sounding rude, but I believe the only reason you are on top right now is due to your astounding popularity. Had you been just another John Doe with a blog or website, I don’t think you’d be in the top 10, let alone the top 50 without having to show a little more effort for your rise to the top.
The reason I feel so compelled to say this is because you make SEO sound so simple and dirty. It isn’t either of those. While it most certainly can be, as you have shown with the former example and many others with the latter, it can also be a rewarding and honest practice too.
Anyway, I don’t think anyone has a chance against your blog. As far as I’m concerned, you don’t have anything to worry about when it comes to directory structure or keywords. It’s all about backlinks - every bit of it. And you’ve got them.
Good luck, and have fun. That’s what this contest is about, not “dirty SEO” this and that. Afterall, now Anil is a glorified SEO himself. :P
And with regards to the last comment, I’m glad Anil didn’t win the last round. All of a month’s hard work would have been for nothing. Anil can be just as content to win this one.
echelon, the point wasn’t that “just another John Doe” could shoot to the top of the list. The point was that someone who had a lot of time and energy vested in creating actual content with value (which is part of why he’s so “astoundingly popular”) could do so.
Echelon, as far as I know, Anil was the only person involved in weblogs seriously competing in the contest. If there had been several, all of them might have done well, but chances are, none of them would have done as well as Anil did with the concerted effort that everyone put behind him.
Anil has invested a lot of time and effort in making his site and popular and he made use of that popular ity just now. I think that this was a good example of what Internet Marketing is all about. Hopefully, others will take the time to learn from this.
Let’s all keep our fingers crossed.
I don’t really care about the SEO challenge (though I’m interested to see how well I do in the second phase — unfortunately, I joined in too late to even show in the first phase). I just think the phrase “nigritude ultramarine” is neat, and I even redesigned my weblog around it. :D
It took only a few moments to create a MovableType plug-in to change spaces for dashes. You can read more at http://www.movabletype.org/support/index.php?act=ST&f=20&t=42000&s=635e636d7fe53d652d49b1eff051d2ad
One problem with underscores is that they’re invisible if the link is underlined. (So some people will think that the link contains spaces.)
http://deyalexander.com/papers/naming.html
Hi Anil, I question the assertion that Google prefers hyphens to underscores. I would love to see verification of that rumour from someone from Google. I don’t see how it makes a difference. If you type in “oxtail stew recipe” into Google, my recipe comes up first. The words “oxtail” and “stew” are highlighted by Google in the URL, even though they are separated by an underscore. The fact that you have keywords in the URL appears to be way more important than how they are separated. It would be a shame for people to go to all the trouble to change their underscores to hyphens if it really doesn’t make that much of a difference. Just my two cents.
elise, that’s a nice distinction - note that if you search for oxtail-stew (with the dash) the returns show Google’s emphasis in the Titles, where the underscore and hyphen appear interchangeable, and also in the snippets of text below, but in the URLs below the snippet only the exact match with the hyphen is emphasized.
I would guess that Google still regards a hyphen as a space and an underscore as a character, as has always been verifiable by simple tests (try searching for key-word, versus key_word) - but Google is getting savvier every hour about how its various simplicities can be gamed.
Echelon is correct above to say that inbound links in this competition far, far outweigh any niceties of page optimization.
It’s your fame that propels your recipe to the top, in spite of your punctuation, I venture to guess, rather than in complete indifference to it. Google throws nothing away, Google knows the difference between a dash and an underscore still, but Google keeps learning how to keep it real in the real world.
hey, thanks for the MT tutorials by the way, I really enjoy your site