Curious.  Perhaps Even Curiouser.

Over at thecotc.com I run the site that is the home of Carnival of the Capitalists.  It replaced a static page that had hosts and info, and a second static page that had previous locations, hosted on elhide.com.

For, well, ever, Googling CotC would get you the original page and the new CotC page on the first page of results, but never higher than about third because of other prominent users of said initials.

For, well, ever, Googling ”Carnival of the Capitalists,” ”carnival capitalists,” and even things like ”capitalist carnival”, varying depending with or without quotes, would get you top results of the original CotC page and the new CotC blog.  In fact, I recently found that the new CotC page finally flipped places and came in above the original, which just redirects to the newer one so doesn’t matter which people click.  I just thought it was cool that it finally came out right, and amazing it took so long.

I noticed the other day that Google wasn’t showing thecotc.com anywhere near the beginning of queries that should bring it up at the very least on the first page of results.

Now it’s also no longer showing the original Carnival of the Capitalists page in the top of the results.  By comparison, the same queries at ask.com give results similar to the former results Google gave.

What are people looking for when they query Carnival of the Capitalists?  They are looking for the home page, from which they can easily find the location of the next or most recent editions, etc.  They are not looking for editions of CotC that happened a year or two ago.

What’s really weird is thecotc.com does eventually show up… in the top 100 hits somewhere, and not a link to the main page, but to a post.  Yet the CotC page still appears to have a page rank of 6.  The nine year old business domain under which it is hosted also has a high page rank and has not changed in terms of search results.  Elhide.com still appears to have a page rank of 5 and CotC results there should also not be gone, except that IMHO they should because the page remaining there is nothing but a blank redirector.  But that’s an old concern that’s not really a concern.

So where did the results go so suddenly?

I always expect each edition of CotC to point to the Carnival of the Capitalists home page, but I have never enforced or explicitly made it a condition of hosting as perhaps I should have.  I always expect each interested, participating blog to blogroll the CotC home page, but have never stressed that.  In either case, many do, if not the number that should, and so there is every reason to expect that so many links to CotC and Carnival of the Capitalists exist out there that the home of Carnival of the Capitalists should be near or at the top, respectively.

Weird.

And time to start emphasizing links from people to the home page.  Which I can encourage by improving it in all my spare time.  Speaking of time, it’s like Funnest Thing Ever waiting for Outlook to synchronize with the server when someone who won’t purge old e-mail has a 660 MB local data cache.  I wonder if it’s done yet…

Posted by on 10/25 at 03:48 PM

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