Does anyone understand how google works?

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How does google determine the status of a site? I'm surprised that wrongplanet doesn't show up near the top when you type in "asperger's."

It's based on many factors including how many sites link to the site in question. thats why we want as many people as possible linnking to us wherever they can.

Read this:

http://www.iprcom.com/papers/pagerank/

Speaking of links. Do you have some samples suitable for putting on blogs or web pages? I'm thinking along the lines of the wrongplanet logo, but quite a bit smaller.

From an SE's view "asperger's" is not an important phrase on this site, so it is logical WP is not listed at the top for that phrase.

en_una_isla, there are entire companies based on trying to answer your question. There are MANY factors, and the "formula" changes all the time. Certain things that might have made a side rank better in the past could actually hurt it now, and vice versa.

For instance, having other sites link to a given website would help boost its rank. But if too many links show up all of a sudden, Google figures the site owner is trying to mess with the system and artificially enhance their position, so they kick the site to the bottom of the list.

As omega mentioned, this site could really benefit from more mentions of "Asperger's Syndrome" and related phrases. But again, go overboard, and Google kicks you in the ass for trying to influence things too much.

It's really an interesting topic!

That is true of course. But a little optimization couldn't hurt, and is never considered going overboard.

I am not an SEO expert, but for example simply having an h1 header containing Asperger's Syndrome and an introduction paragraph to AS directly underneath (a.o. containing the words Asperger and autisitic a couple of times) at the (HTML) top of the index page would help a lot already.



The search engines simply need a way to find out what the subject of the page is, which is almost impossible if the right HTML markup isn't used to emphasize the most important words on the page (like on the current WP index page).

Agreed.

Another thing that would be very beneficial is to configure/hack the forum software so that the thread name is in the title / metas. Something like:

(name of thread) - Asperger's and Autism Forum

Google likes seeing pages with a variety of title/meta information (it interprets this as the site having a wide variety of related content), and since so many threads contain things like "aspies" and such, it'd help to get the site ranking for various related keywords.