Google

I've been collecting a list of activist websites, primarily english speaking from the US and Canada, for my conference finding bot.

Here is a customized google search that uses those sites:

http://www.google.com/coop/cse?cx=006452045356193133822:sp984foeerq

Loosely based on the idea of Google's PageRank (a measurement of a page's authority, based on the strength of incoming links), I think it would be interesting to have one or more measurements of PoliticalRank for web sites.

Unlike PageRank, which is more of a quantity measurement, PoliticalRank would be a quality one - evaluating the relative political position of a website on a basic left to right scale (where left wing pages would be quality, just kidding!).

You'd need to write a bot that would collect a massive database of webpages. Then you'd evaluate the relative politics of each website (and perhaps each page on each site) based on factors like keywords, the site that the page was on, incoming links, outgoing links, and ultimately on user site reviews.

Ouch! My website traffic is down by 50-70%. Now I'm getting around 1200-1500 visits/day. Google has put many of this site's pages in the supplemental results, which means they appear very low in the search engine rankings and will generally get you zero google search traffic.

I could understand Google putting the school pages or silly zip codes pages in supplementals - but they put many of the group pages in supplementals. That doesn't make sense because those pages have a lot of unique content (group descriptions and names differ a lot).

It's possible that having both the activismnetwork.org and campusactivism.org site with the same content is causing trouble.

If you do a Google search it will often show results that do not have the word you searched for, but instead include a word that Google has determined to be a synonym.

What is particularly interesting, is that Google doesn't use traditional synonyms.

If you do a search for "activism network", Google shows results with both "activism network" (and note that it highlights "activist network" in the search results), and "activist network". However if you search for "activist network" it only shows results for that. The results for "activism network" are nowhere to be seen. This is because it treats "activism" as a one-way synonym for "activist", but it doesn't treat "activist" that as a one-way synonym for "activism".

CampusActivism.org recently achieved a Google PageRank of 7. The site had been at 6 for a couple years, with a brief period where it dipped to 5.

This is particularly significant as PageRank is a logarithmic scale with an estimated base of around 6. So having a PR of 7 is six times better than a 6. On the other hand it could just be a tiny improvement, an increase from 6.49 to 6.51 would show up as a move from 6 to 7.

I suspected that my PR of 6 was a high "6" and might one day reach 7. The website was increasing its traffic and the number of incoming links gradually, and its PR should grow accordingly.

Google changed its search engine rankings significantly on June 27. It's probably not an actual algorithm change. According to several people on WebmasterWorld it is more likely that Google removed sites from its database entirely, quite possibly by accident.

You can tell if this happenned to your site, by noticing if your traffic fell by a huge amount on June 27 (I have a site where my Google traffic fell 98% -- eg it is 1/50th of what it was before), if when you search for exact rare terms (eg "keyword1 keyword2 keyword3 keyword4" - be sure to use quotations) that your site always appears last or almost last in the rankings, and if when you do a google search for site:www.domain.org your homepage doesn't show up as the first result.

The Google Sandbox is an effect where your website does well for the first several weeks, and then loses almost all of its traffic for several months, before recovering. It's probably a golf reference. The theory is that Google puts your site in a penalty box for several months to stop people from creating new spammish websites to rank #1 in Google.

Google has never, to my knowledge, admitted that this penalty exists. However at WebmasterWorld I believe the general consensus is that there is something in the Google algorithm that causes a sandbox effect.

There is another theory that Google penalizes sites that develop too quickly. If your site appears overnight and all of a sudden you have several hundred or thousand incoming links, then Google will suspect you of buying your links and might penalize you for that. If Google did this, the effect could be similar to that of the sandbox.