Search engines

Running my own blog gives me some insights into how the internet works, which is a fascinating subject. For example I noticed that since several major gaming sites linked to my hidden quests in WoW blog entry, the number of visitors per day I get doubled from 100 to 200. And that is after the big spike from the first couple of days was over. At first I thought that people still followed those links from the gaming sites, but studying the Sitemeter data revealed that something else is happening:

Basically due to being linked to my "page rank" in Google went up, from 4 to 5, and the equivalent happened on other search engines. Which means that if you search something MMORPG related on these search engines, and I wrote about it, my blog entry appears higher up in the list than before. Curiously for some not-so-exotic keyword combinations like "DDO release" I even occupy the first place in Google (no guarantee that this will still be the case tomorrow). And obviously the higher up my blog is in a search engine result, the higher is the chance that somebody clicks on the link leading to me.

I even get the impression that this is a self-reinforcing trend. People link to me, my Google page rank goes up, more people find me, and then some of the people that newly discovered me end up linking to me. I just hope I never hit the point where Blogger (owned by Google) tells me that they can't host my blog for free any more. Although seeing how generous they are with the size of my GMail account (2 Gigabyte for free), I don't see that happening anytime soon.
- posted by Tobold @ 4:44 PM Permanent Link