jw7 said:
A google spider is a program used by google to put content in their search engine database. They go around the web, "read" web pages, and index every word so when people do google searches, they get a link back to the website.
There are certain times of the month when they go bananas, that would explain the 150+ guests the other day. Other times they are rather dormant.
Google spiders are a good thing, it increases the chances that people will find the site when they type in "Assface is stupid" or whatnot.
Another factor that influences how high a search term shows up in a google search is "page rank". The biggest factor that affects page rank is how many web pages link to the site. So if you like ASFN, and have a web page, consider putting a link to ASFN in there, it would help out!
Problem is, links are weighted based on their pagerank as well. Chances are your own web page, hosted off your ISP, has a zero or one pagerank, and will do very little to increase this sites pagerank if you link to it.
What dramatically increases your pagerank is getting links from places that already have high pageranks, like nfl.com, or espn.com. This is done so that you can't just make a ton of pointless websites that link here just to increase the pagerank, you have to actually get other highly ranked pages to link here, and chances are those highly ranked sites are not under your control.
The beauty of being a webmaster is if you do control a highly ranked site (or ten) you can use them to quickly pump your new sites rank.
This is why when you search for "Arizona Cardinals" you don't get this site. It's not even on the first five pages. Because azcardinals.com has links directly from nine rated sites like nfl.com, and espn.com. NFL.com, espn.com, cbs.sportsline.com, cnnsi.com all rank higher, because they benefit from their parent sites linking to them.
If not for Jeff Gollin, I would have never known this site existed because it's not very well optimized for web crawlers like google.
Try typing "link:www.arizonasportsfans.com" into a google search. It will give you a list of the pages that are linked to the main page. Notice a complete lack of big name sites linking here? Also note, most of the pages listed are internal pages on this very site. Number one happens to be joeshmo's profile page, heh.
Big Red Seet suffer these same problems. If you want straight up Cardinals news, these two sites are the best there is out there, but they lose out because of poor optimization and the the big players established web presence.
Anf finally, pagerank is only one component of google's overall alogrithm for determining what ranks where for a
specific search. Keyword density factors heavily into this. Google also weights keywords in <b> and <h1>, and <a> tags heavier.
I'm done beig a geek now.
