Wildly good rankings for wildly bad web pages - part 1
Often while I’m surfing the interwebs, I find that some web pages just don’t belong on the first page of search results on a given search term. In this continuing series of epic proportions (of which I have no idea just how many parts I’m going to do… but with the number of pages out there, it could be anything…), I’m going to highlight some keyword searches which yield surprising results.
The first search I want to direct your attention to is for a favorite candy of mine when I was a wee little toddler - a tootsie roll. Scanning the results looks good in the beginning… “69 Boyz” ooookiedokie… but look at result #7. A GeoCities site?! Looking at that page’s content I see a couple of polls, a couple of lines of text on the top, some links… and that’s it? Interesting.
The second search we’ll be looking at today is search results for one of my favorite cartoons when I was in elementary school - darkwing duck. Again, scanning the results and everything looks in order for the first couple results (I have to recommend the Swedesh intro version of the show - it’s hilarious).. up until result #8, which is another dang GeoCities site! That looks straight from the early 90’s.
So even though these pages are indeed “bad” (I’m sorry, but for no matter what search a GeoCities page shouldn’t show up in the first 10 results), this does teach us a valuable lesson: search engines love web pages / sites that have been around for a long time. If they’ve been live for “x” amount of years, Google instills more “trust” into them. So even though these pages might look terrible and not have a whole heck of a lot of content… they’ve stood the test of (internet) time.
Interesting thought, I’ll have to Google some other stuff to see if it holds true.