Thursday March 29, 2007

Blog rankings

Just now I had the extremely weird experience of looking something up with Google and getting as the very first result, ta-da! my own blog. It was a bit like dialing a random telephone number and getting my own voice mail.

Here's what happened. Someone wrote me an e-mail about a Petrarchan sonnet and used the word "octet" to refer to the first eight lines. I was pretty sure that this was inaccurate, and that the correct term is "octave," which people mix up with the term for the last six lines, "sestet."

But I wasn't quite sure, so I figured I'd check. I thought I remembered that Karen Ciccone told me that Google now allows truncation with asterisks, so I entered this search string:

petrarchan sonnet sestet oct*

I've now remembered that what Karen actually said was that you can use asterisks within quotation marks to search Google, so that, for instance, you can search "the * is too much with us" and find Wordsworth's famous sonnet. But you know how it is when you're Googling, especially if you're a fast typist -- it's easier to Google than it is to think.

So Google didn't recognize my asterisk as a truncation, and simply searched for "oct." Which, of course, is a well-known abbreviation for "October," so you can see why a blog that uses abbreviated months in its datestamps would rank high. And that helps explain why the first result I got for that search was the blog I created last semester for a graduate course in Victorian Poetry. I also wonder whether Google KNOWS IT'S ME (I was signed in at the time) and is giving me a top result from a site it has reason to believe I'd be interested in.

But it's still weird to me, just how findable the course blogs that I created last semester are, and how high their hit counts continue to be. My course blogs for ENG 560 and ENG 669 continue to make the "hot blogs" list on the front page of WolfBlogs, getting anywhere from 5 to 30 hits per day, usually. The Victorian Poetry blog, in particular, continues to keep its profile high even though no one's visiting the blog anymore. The course is over, so no one's posting or commenting, and no other site has linked to the blog.

So here's my question: Why are those basically defunct blogs still so "hot"? I've looked at the referrer logs, and while they do show lots of hits from Google and other search engines, they also list lots of "direct" (which can mean "unidentified") hits. Sometimes the "direct" hits are double the hits from search engines. Any explanations?

I did write once to Scott Warren, "I'd bet that the reason my course blogs continue to rank high in WolfBlogs is that both the assignments and especially the comments contain a whole lot of really specific, concrete, familiar terms, such as names of authors, poems, and books. Those kinds of terms are heavily searched, as Jakob Nielsen points out." If that's true, it would confirm the real importance of particular kinds of web writing in good web ranking. Blogs do, of course, rank high in Google results generally, but that doesn't explain why my old, unvisited blogs are often getting more hits than (say) Horseless Library.

Wouldn't it be cool if we could make a library website that appeared in the top results whenever information-illiterate students Googled their research topics? Imagine what would happen if all those dynamically-generated catalog pages were crawled.

By the way: That Google search didn't really do it for me, so I turned around in my chair, reached up on the shelf, pulled down my copy of The New Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics, and discovered that I was right. The correct term is "octave."