h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Okay, so does anyone understand how Google rate the websites that they link to? Mark Moxon U13 has a travel website at http://www.moxon.net/.

If you put in Travel Writer he comes up as number five listing in the whole of Google.

If you put in "Travel Writer" he comes up as the number one listing!

Now I'm bias, I think his websites are great, but neither of us can understand how he's managed to get quite so high in the listings.

Does anyone know how Google categorises these? I thought that they did it based on links from other sites, but this is perhaps not the whole story? Mark's site is linked to from quite a few places, but he can't be the most linked to travel writer in the world!?

Lovely, but a bit surprising! (I wonder how long it will be before Google twig?)

Don't you mean U13...

I suspect you've been spending too much time with Jim lately.

And I really don't understand the whole Google thing. A lot of my h2g2 entries are the number one listing for that subject area - surely my writing isn't *that* obscure.

http://www.google.com/technology/pigeonrank.html explains. Actually, it doesn't. But http://www.google.com/technology/ does...

Whoami?

You should ask currybet! But as the name of his site is 'Travel Writer', he's linked to by that name, which will bring him up in a higher position. They also count the importance of the sites linking to him - the BBC is a very important site, so that gives him added credibility. Both you and Mark are linking to him like that from your Hub spaces. I'm not sure why putting the " " round it make a difference, I was told that Google did them automatically!

Look how many people link to him...

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&lr=&q=link+to%3A+http%3A%2F%2Fwww.moxon.net%2F&btnG=Search
Results 1 - 10 of about 58 for link to: http://www.moxon.net/

... popular lad!

If you put " " round what you're searching for, it searches for that exact phrase. Without the " ", it just searches for the individual words...

As I said, I was told that Google does that automatically.

The only time it does that automatically is if you go to the advanced search page, and type your query in the 'exact phrase' box... as far as I know, anyway...

I tried
writer travel (without quotes) and guess what came first?

























Mark Moxon, Travel Writer: Travel Tips