Thread: Search Engine Rankings... anybody know how they work?

I have a website, matthoover.com. If you search for "matt hoover" on Google or Yahoo I am usually anywhere between the 3rd and 6th result. On live.com I actually get 1st place which is cool, but it should be that way on all 3, I think. The site which is outranking me is matthoover.net, which belongs to some guy who had 15 seconds of fame on a reality TV show.

What boggles my mind is that my site has fluctuated between rank 2,000,000 and 6,000,000 on alexa.com (web traffic rankings). This may not sound like much, but it's actually sort of respectable (considering my market), and certainly infinitely better than the "none" ranking which my "competitor" receives (meaning he's not in the top 10 million, at least). So if that site doesn't even get enough traffic for alexa.com to put it in their top 10 million (or however many it goes up to)... then how on earth does Google put it above mine?

http://www.alexa.com/data/details/tr...eamplayers.com

we're in the 300,000's usually.

I know google and yahoo ranks factor in the site title and content, obviously, but also factor in how many referrals or links your site gets from other sites (essentially measuring the buzz around your content). The more referrals and links that other sites give yours....the more popular the search engines see it.

I'd like to see us being in the top 100,000 by the end of the year.

I found some interesting stuff here... looks like links from one high ranking site are more important than links from a dozen low ranking sites. Which explains how this reality show guy has a high rank despite almost no traffic... he probably got a link from one of the TV network sites the reality show was on.

Here is another good link BigDog... TTP PR=2, even I've got you beat (3), ouch!