I originally published this tongue-in-cheek description of night storage heaters on TDV's intranet when we were at Maiden Lane, because people had been complaining that nobody really understood how the office heating worked. (I also wrote a sensible set of operating instructions - sadly, those weren't on the Ripley-powered intranet, and so they're probably lost forever).
A while later, two odd things happened. Firstly, the h2g2 terms and conditions were changed to make any articles published on the site become the property of h2g2, so I moved my heaters article over to my personal website, and linked to it from here.
The second odd thing was that Google decided I was the world authority on night storage heaters. Nearly all the traffic to my site was from people looking for the things, and for almost a year I was the number one search result for 'storage heaters'.
Why? Because Google ranks sites by how authoritative it believes they are, and it decides this by looking at how many people link to the site. H2g2 had just launched, it was riding the crest of Douglas's publicity, and *everyone* was linking to it.
Consequently, for a while, Google considered h2g2 an authority on all sorts of things. And because any links *from* h2g2 are also treated with the same deference, my silly little webpage was considered quite important.
Of course, Google are constantly tweaking the way they make their decisions, especially in light of the massively nepotistic interlinking of weblogs, and the emergence of the daft practice of GoogleBombing1. Some time after the move to the BBC, Google's spiders were told they were unwelcome, so my moment of glory passed.
And yet, strangely, for nearly five years, Google seemed to think that my website has some clout. When I linked to the website of some UK customs consultants, they immediately shot to the first page of results for several months. Then they slipped down to the third or fourth page, and a year later were back at the number one position. Even odder, they appear nowhere when searching for customs consultant - singular!
When I linked to Shim's site with the phrase Google Juice-Meister, in no time at all the phrase 'Juice-Meister' made his site the number three result.
Now, I had thought it was because I was linking to Douglas's tea article and the Niagara Falls, but these pages are only linked to by a dozen or so sites each.
How do I know this? Well, one of the little-known features of Google is its list of sites linking *to* a particular page. According to this list, only five sites link to mine, and my front page is the only page that links to the heaters article ... not even this page you're reading!
What's puzzling me most is the way Google both "spikes" (where linking causes a site to rank highly for a number of weeks, only to slip away again) and "sticks" (a site continues to rank highly, even if it's no longer linked to).
I have a suspicion that it's to do with sites having commercial content - perhaps because competitors have to respond to a usurper by Googlebombing their own sites, or perhaps because Google tracks the through-clicks and lets "unpopular" sites slip back down.
To test this theory, I set about watching the traffic to this low cost life cover website that Shim and I developed. (To ensure both the accuracy of the experiment and to make sure we're not breaking h2g2 house rules on advertising, please don't bother to click that link - only Google's bots will be allowed access if the link came from this page).
Now, because life cover is a highly competitive area, companies build whole farms of fake websites simply to trick Google into thinking that sites are well-regarded. It seemed incredibly unlikely therefore that a single link from this page could have any effect whatsoever on the ranking of the four million other results that Google returns for the phrase.
After several months, h2g2 made not a dent on the Google page rankings. Sure, the life cover site received plenty of Googlebot hits, but it never appeared on the first twenty pages.
So I decided to try again, with a less niche market - card-making supplies. I'd yet to find this site with Google, even after several years linking from here - it was beginning to look like h2g2 didn't have the same clout.
My most recent experiment featured the Lord Whisky animal sanctuary; while Google knows the Scotch spelling, the Irish variant "Lord Whiskey" fails to find the site. Animal rescue operations aren't exactly fiercely competitive arenas, so I'll interested to see whether the Googlebot will follow these links and adjust its ranking accordingly.
Oddly, now searches for Sean Solle don't find my site as the top result - perhaps Google have finally realised that I really know nothing about heaters after all?
1 GoogleBombing: generating a high page rank by linking from many diverse sites to the target with a specific phrase, e.g. "Miserable Failure" or "clueless muppets".
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