This post over on Scottish Sceptic’s website (below) points to a problem that WUWT has with search engines. One big issue he raises is that I can’t edit meta tags in the website header, but then again, I’ve had a clue that hasn’t mattered for a couple of years now, from the WordPress forum:
It’s not possible to edit meta tags on WordPress.com blogs.
…
Moreover Google does not use the keywords meta tag in web ranking – Monday, September 21, 2009
http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2009/09/google-does-not-use-keywords-meta-tag.html
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WUWT – page 35 when searching for “global warming”
Following some comments on WUWT about the “+1″ scheme to boost ratings, I first joined the scheme, then decided to do it the old fashioned way and click on the WUWT link when searching for “global warming”.
So, imagine my surprise when I found WUWT on …
PAGE 35
Yes, that is right! WUWT was on page 35 … I had to double check to make sure it was right because it was behind the GWPF, behind climate audit, behind unrealclimate, behind the IPCC behind sites that none of us have ever heard of.
- So, why was it on page 35 of the google results?
- Why having clicked on it just once, did it move (via another PC on another URL) to page 34?
- And, why when I checked the page, was there not a single meta-tag telling the google search engine this site had anything or wanted anything to do with global warming?
The simple answer given the ease by which I escalated the ranking by a single click is that no one ever clicks on a WUWT page when they search for global warming. And before everyone starts point to google bias, obviously, no one trusts the top ranking sites (they are mostly paid for … or promoted due to google’s own politics) but whilst it is quite possible WUWT has a lower ranking than it should, I think there is much more to this and quite a lot has nothing to do with Google and so I have a few suggestions:
- I have to be honest, and say that I don’t think Anthony Watts has a clue about publicising his site particularly for search engines. E.g. he doesn’t even mention global warming as a search term in the meta tabs telling search engines which words and phrases characterise the site. That just screams out that he doesn’t exactly make his site google friendly and it’s not surprising that it is so lowly rated.
- Sceptics most probably do not use Google to find the site. If we don’t search on google, how is google supposed to know that people want to find that site when they search?
- And yes, Google hates WUWT … and more than likely is actively trying to repress the site. OK, we have to accept that, so we have to work together to try to reverse this.
What can be done
1. Search for global warming and click on the WUWT site.
Go to google and enter “global warming”. Then click the last number at the bottom to go to pages 10, then 19, etc. until you reach page 35 3435.
(Addendum: the next WUWT page is around page 70 of google results!!)
Then start going backwards until you find an entry for any page linked to wattsupwiththat.com and then click it.
Repeat prescription every day!
2. Add a link to wattsupwiththat.com
Where ever and when ever add a link.
3. Join the “+1 scheme“
Join the scheme and then find the WUWT pages and press the +1 button
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He makes some good points that would make a good new year’s resolution – help spread the word. There is one thing I can do, and that is make a change to the header image to remove the masthead statement and place it into the first lines of text. I’ve made that change today to see if it helps.
As always, my sincerest thanks in advance to everyone who helps support this website in words and deeds.
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30 million views last year and only page 35??? I’ve just got a youtube video to the top of page one for “andrea rabbits”, and front page for quite a few other searches, in 16 days without really trying!!!
Maybe Google prefers animal abuse to AGW skepticism
Anthony –
I know more about search engine optimization than I do about weather. Contact me offline if you’d like some doable tips.
Mike
currently on p55.
The ScottishSkeptics remarks indicates he has little understanding of how Google search ranking works. So faced with his own ignorance he just makes stuff up.
The basis of Google’s original page ranking is published, but the current implementation details and algorithm are secret. That’s to prevent people gaming the system. The reason meta tags is now irrelevant and has always been irrelevant to Google is because people used them to game the system.
Repeatedly searching for global warming/watsupwiththat and variations is not going to improve this web sites page rank. It’s an obvious route to gaming the system and the Google algorithm will take no notice. So click away as madly as you want.
The whole basis of SEO is well studied. Learn what people have written. Do not make stuff up.
December 31, 2011 @ur momisugly 20:14 hours Mountain time you have advanced to page 13! You were not there before, trust me I looked. Happy New Year WUWT team
And Happy New Year to you, Kenneth. -REP
Boy I hate it when Google adds search terms and you do not catch it! My Bad! The first article from WUWT is the 2012 Billion Deaths piece at page 26! My deepest apologies (BOO HOO HOO).
There are some misinformed people on this topic. The site isn’t optimized for global warming, so it doesn’t rank for global warming.
Finding and clicking on links will do zero to improve the rankings, and it’s doubtful the +1 will do much either. This is because any action that can be done like this can be automated – so improving rankings would be as simple as writing a bot to walk search engine results and register lots of clicks.
Meta tags do nothing – they are neither helpful nor damaging.
The number 1 factor for ranking a site is contextual links and keywords in the URL. So if you want to rank for global warming you need to cone up with a couple of standard links including HTML with the correct keywords and ask others to link to the site using link text like ‘global warming information’. So instead of readers doing +1 it’s far more important to get them to link to the site with the right keywords. Domain authority counts for the source as well – getting a link from the new york times is better than from an unknown blog.
A further problem thus site has is the frequently long comment pages which mean the HTML page size is quite large and oversized pages cause lower rankings.
If you want to rank better drop the conspiracy theories and get some real SEO advice. For a site of this reach it should be a doddle to optimize better.
Ok people seriously settle down with the conspiracy hats. The ‘block all xyz.com results’ you see is when you visit any site and return quickly back to the search results page. A click and fast return is surmised as the page not being relevant to the search, so you are asked if you want to block that site in the future. Any blocking is done for personalization reasons, and doesn’t affect the overall ranking of the site.
As a general rule, there is nothing you can do to a site to lower it’s ranking ( if you’re not the admin, I mean) If you could, there would be a software arms race to try and destroy each others rankings, which is the opposite of what google wants, which is for you to return to their search engine and occasionally click on ads.
People need to get some perspective on the scale of search engine computing and realize that google is not going to spend time and effort to try and squelch the results of some climate blogs.
I suggest making a call out for some volunteer SEO advice to help optimize the site, plus a clear-it-all-up post so people lose the tinfoil hats a little.
To control views per page, use the options symbol (cog image, upper right). In Search Settings, turn off Google Instant, then use the Results slider, then Save.
__
Anthony, suggest you compress your new title to “Most viewed global warming and climate change site”. I know it implies that’s all the site deals with, but it fits everything into the Google display/description.
I noticed how keywords can play games with Google ads, ironically, on a fly fishing website…just google Mingo’s thong…the reference was to footwear , but the google ads were for skimpy underwear…aka knickers…
Forget “global warming” searches, what is more important are the results from other keyword searches:
enron “joe romm”
“al gore” google enron
google agw bias
Try out combo’s like those and see what the results are.
For a laugh, try “Google Games is fun”…and you can see how ‘Chris’ played right into the little game, bad grammar and all…
Checkmate Chris.
My apologies for any R-rated google ads due to the thong reference…but hey if it helps drive web traffic!
Andrew
The fact that it’s taken so long to do this minimal search-engine-ranking optimization torpedoes the accusation that this site is part of anything professionally organized and well-funded.
Michael J says: December 31, 2011 at 3:03 pm, beat me to it when he said:
This is why folks are finding WUWT on slightly different pages. It’s all based on the preferences they’ve set (or not set) in google, how they use the search engine over time, e.g., your search history, where they are physically (yes, google notes where you are and adjusts results accordingly, at least to some extent), even based partly on what browser, operating system, etc., you are using. So it probably makes no sense to keep posting what page you find WUWT on, unless its significantly earlier or later than a rough page 35ish. Google used to be a LOT more useful – now all too often one has to wade thru a load of crap to find anything useful, all because of ‘improvements’ they’ve made to the search function. Sigh.
I got you on page 31. It was heartening nevertheless to see so many sceptical links between 1 and 31. Seemed to be hardly any 12 months ago IMO.
According to this article:
http://codex.wordpress.org/Meta_Tags_in_WordPress
Meta tags are possible, but are not used by Google anymore “Google does no longer use the meta keyword and they confirm this in their Webmaster Central Blog”.
My last search found you on page 34, down from page 28 🙁
I scanned through 45 pages of google output and could not find WUWT!
I found it on page 32.
I typed in scientific blogs on climate change and got WUWT on the 2nd page.
A lot of hot air over a non-problem today — so what’s new? 🙂
Anthony, you have a Google Page Rank of 5 as I said earlier. That is an excellent ranking. It means you are way up the list on certain search terms.
I would not worry in the least about searches on global warming placing you down the list; that’s not what we read your pages for. We read them for commentary on puzzling things in life, nature, science, weather, climate change etc as it says in your masthead. If you want to optimise your search engine results, you need to know what the most popular search terms are that people use that do find your site through a Google search and use those words liberally in your commentary. If your web’s stats aren’t gathering these data, you can pay a small fee to a service that does.
You also need to kill the outgoing links to Climate Audit, Jo Nova, William Briggs etc. These downgrade your Google Page Rank. Actually, I hope you don’t because it enables me to get to those places having only bookmarked WUWT.
Have as many websites with a higher Google Page Rank than yours link to WUWT. SEO is not rocket science.
Noelene said @ur momisugly December 31, 2011 at 10:21 pm
“I typed in scientific blogs on climate change and got WUWT on the 2nd page.”
And I searched on “science blogs climate”. WUWT is seventh on the first page. (Un)RealClimate came in at number one, but no need for conspiracy theories. They are linked to by NASAA who probably have a Google Page Rank of 9, or 10. Also they don’t have too many outgoing links (the last time I looked).
Noelene said @ur momisugly December 31, 2011 at 10:21 pm
“I typed in scientific blogs on climate change and got WUWT on the 2nd page.”
And I searched on “science blogs climate”, WUWT is number seven on the first page. While (Un)RealClimate is at number one, this is readily explained by their being linked to by NASAA and other pages with high Google Page Rank.
I repeat: there is no problem needing a solution here. Now where have I read that before? :-))))
Google “Climategate” brought up WUWT on page 1, 5th entry, but took me to the 2 year old Climategate 1.0 post index.
Modify that index to take the reader to the the Climategate 2.0 – indexes.
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2011/11/22/climategate-2-0/
Oh, I see… A wordpress.com site can not add plugins unless you pay big money to get a VIP site.
Those who are seeing “Block all wattsupwiththat.com results”: That happens when you follow a Google link to a site and then click to go back to the previous page (the Google results page). Google detects that you returned, so it offers to let you block results for that site in the future. This is so you can avoid sites which you dislike. I think you also have to be logged in to your Google account, so some people won’t see that option.
To get past this problem I have a word press blog embedded into my main website, using CSS scripting for the headers and footers, gives consistency to the pages, and meta word control, while using the blog content to verify the meta words. Granted my total traffic is a lot less than WUWT, but I get responses to most of my key word search hits on the first three pages in most search engines. My daughter builds web sites and pages with social media attributes built in to give the site owners control of the content in a manageable form using wordpress.
Hybrid site construction allows both ease of use, and search engine access.
Map upgrade to more detailed maps, (72DPI TO 600DPI, single degree contour lines instead of 10 degree steps) and additional countries covered is coming on line soon. Previewing the new maps and the timing of the additional cycle of data, has resulted in better fine tuning of the match between the past cycles and today’s cycle.
Page 6 for me and it showed up as being +1’d by me previously. Now I must go and lay down as searching on google for global warming goes against my sensibilities! Happy New Year all!!
Search on January 1st:
Key word: global warming
and then looking for Watt in the result
on Google: position 193
on Bing: position 547
on Yahoo: position 664