Rainer Feike techblog

On my search about if search engines like small site or big sites I found no satisfying answer. So I set up a little experiment on my own. I drive a lawyer directory with like about 20.000 pages for two years now. For search terms like “Rechtsanwalt Berlin” - I am aiming for city specific searches - I rank very well on the first SERP.

Now I set up special pages for the most biggest cities in Germany, having urls like rechtsanwalt–berlin (double dash - cause single was already taken for sure) and put three pages there. So it’s a real small site with a very specific topic.

Today - with this entry - I make it public and give em some PR power. In four weeks we’ll see how they do.

Rechtsanwalt Berlin
This is Germanys most biggest city. My current anwalt-seiten ranking on Google is 10. Now I started the special site Rechtsanwalt Berlin - let’s see what happens in like two weeks.

Rechtsanwalt Hamburg
This is Germanys second biggest city close to the North Sea. My current ranking on Google is 9. I set up the special site Rechtsanwalt Hamburg lately - let’s see what happens.

Rechtsanwalt München
This is Germanys third biggest city and I always have troubles with the “ü”. You probably now it from the Oktoberfest!
My current ranking on Google is 18. I launched Rechtsanwalt München view days ago - be patient…

I’ll keep you informed here.

I recently wanted to check my entries in dmoz and found some of my sites were kicked out. Why did they do this? Didn’t get any explanation for sure. They did some work like reorganizing the structure - or whatever. Well, I’m a little bit angry currently - but it doesn’t make sense anyway anymore (except for backlinks - is dmoz a huge link-farm?).

Do you know a single person that uses a directory to browse the internet? Don’t think so.. but if yes - she will not use dmoz more then two times. In the “rich subject tree” you’re everytime a dozen clicks away from your goal - and the choice is subject to ‘editors’, and what’s the relation to AOL? That’s exactly not what the democratic web2.0 is for.

Google claims a few hours to add an interesting new site to its index - the dmoz wants some weeks or months. So maybe we miss some important happening when using dmoz?

Thanks a lot to all the hundreds of thousands of editors that were building the biggest directory of the universe - I am afraid it’s out-dated now - you can not take the challenge of the rapidly growing web anymore.

Yahoo already gave up - when will dmoz power off?

Google ist extending their power in a very new way. They redefine searching in the internet by giving pages value depending on how many people visit the page, where they come from and how long they stay.

How do they do this? The key is their Analytics -Knowledge. Because Google-Analytics is the very best website analysis tool - best in content, best in drilling down, best in installation effort, best in cost, best in speed - everybody uses it. And because every webmaster is using Google-Analytics Google knows where the webusers go to.

By using simple statistics Google can relay on their knowledge by at least - let’s say 95%. They know how many websites exist, and they know how many websites are using Analytics. The rest is simple statistics.

So, while all the SEO’s are staring at the pagerank, Google is redesigning their search algorithm. Important is what attracts people, valuable is what keeps them staying a long time, sustaining is what makes them come back. It will be a little bit like yellow press.

In the end, I think all over valuable content for the masses will make the race to the Google Top Ten. What is still necessary to make it perfect for Google is some semantic knowledge. I am keen on Google’s next “free-of-charge” product.

In any case the losers will be msn, yahoo, altavista… they don’t have the Analytics, their search results will stay miserable.

After I was registering for Google’s sitemaps program, I was surprised that I found indirect links to my pages in the external links index. As you know, the old “link:www….” syntax has been disabled by google (does not show all the database secrets anymore) cause of too much abuse by “who-knows-who’s”.

So, if you want to know, what sites are really linking in, you have to subscribe to the sitemaps program. I have lots of indirect links (links working with the http-redirect, for example for click-counters) to my open source projects in software catalogs. Never thought they would count anything. But surprise, they are in the google database.

Hot question: Do they count in PR calculation?