Google’s “Old School” Bonus
No, this has nothing to do with the movie for all of you Old School fans, this has to do with a situation which I have been watching since the beginning of February with one of our sites. The site, which I will not name here, has been in existence since 1997 jumped to the top of the SERPs in early February when many people, including yours truly, saw some of their sites go bye bye. All but one of those sites has since come back to life and the website in question still ranks at the top of the charts for many competitive search terms. The website in question is an ecommerce website that I used to “optimize” for search engines like Altavista, Excite, Hotbot and a few other old school search engines before we had fancy names for things like SEO/SEM. The site enjoys listings in Yahoo’s directory as well as in DMOZ (sigh, the good ole days when you got these things for free) and I have not touched it with regards to SEO/SEM for years. Yet, on February 2nd, the site jumped to the top of the SERPs in Google (which I don’t think it ever enjoyed on G) and I have not been able to explain why. So, I am for now going to go with the theory that it has been around forever, has Yahoo Directory, DMOZ (and hence Google Directory) listings, and has not changed one bit in forever. Maybe Google has decided that if you are “Old School” and your information has not really changed much over the years, that it must be pretty darn good.
I know this is a really silly conclusion, but I really have no other way to explain it.