Wednesday, November 24, 2004

How Google works

I was checking the site stats for my kid's school website Providence Christian Academy and noticed that three Google hits were from "kevin heifner". I thought that was odd since my name does not appear anywhere on the site (or the source for the site). I then googled for "kevin heifner" and was surprised to find that the number one link for my name was www.pcastl.org.

So how could the number one link for my name be a Christian School in St. Louis that does not contain my name? Its not like my name does appear on other sites. So why would www.pcastl.org be number one on the list?

Well... Recently I posted to Weiqi's Blog and since I didn't have a webpage of my own, I just used the website of Providence. It turns out that Google uses the words used to link to a page to match search phrases. So since "kevin heifner" was used to link to www.pcastl.org, Google setup their index so when someone searches for "kevin heifner" it lists www.pcastl.org as the number one link.

So it should be possible to get Google to list the www.pcastl.org for searches such as: Christian School St. Louis or Christian Education St. Louis or Christian K-12 School by creating links like those of this sentence. All I need to do now is wait for the google-bots to find this page and see what happens.

1 comment:

Weiqi Gao said...

This is what they call a google bomb. If your blog is in the blogrolls of enough other blogs, you can own your name on Google: type in your first name in Google, click on "I'm feeling lucky," and your blog will show up. Try "Jon."

Hmmm, I seem to own the phrase "Owning your name on Google."