Pale Musings

It has been 12 days since Dave put up his viewstate test pages with the keyword Arkliode.  Watching Google each weekday has brought about a few interesting thoughts

1. Initially the index page with a link to each of his tests ranked #1.  This went on for most of last week.
2. One of the tests ranked under the index page when you click on the “View similar results” link on the initial Google search.
3. My original post was ranking #2 for most of last week.  It only had the word “arkliode” once in one of the comments.
4. This morning, my original post shows up #1.  Yes, that is the post with the word only displayed once in a comment.
5. Google gives more weight to blog posts.  This has been generally accepted for quite a while.  That explains the change in #1 ranking.
6. Incoming links play a large part in the role.  I am attributing that reasoning to the drop of the one page that was returning in the results.  The incoming links simply go to the index page.
7. Duplicate content has been assumed to have a negative impact.  Since most of the test content pages have the same or very similar content, I am theorizing that Google is recognizing them as duplicate and since the only links going to them are from the index page.

The next question is, how do we begin to make the test valid?  I suppose we would have to post the different pages on separate sites to try to get a better idea, yet the popularity and ranking of the sites would undoubtedly play into the ranking.

Dave has changed things up a bit, which might account for the changes over the weekend. Should people begin linking to the pages on their sites to see if indexing begins to happen?  That’s what Dave did.  Here are the links to the pages.

• test
• test
• test
• test
• test
• test

I will check back in later this week or early next week.  I’m sure Dave will have at least one update in that time-frame as well.