The Knitting Fiend

I looked at my referer stats at site meter, and noticed google sent to someone looking for “best knitting blogs” to my site.

“Wow!” I thought. ” I gotta see how high I rank on ‘best knitting blogs’!

Well, according to Google, I’m number 6! Whoo hoo! Google must really knows it’s stuff!

(Terrific blogger Christine, is number 9; you will find her blogs under my favorites. )

Then, I looked more carefully. Something is fishy. Entries number 1-5 , 7, 8 and 10 aren’t even knit blogs!
They are pages that claim to identify the best knit blogs. (Although, I must say, they look mostly pretty lame to me. )

Well, if you look at them, they are pages that say “knitting”, “blogs” and “best” somewhere on them. And many point to one another.

Now, looking even more carefully, how did I get my rank? Did someone dub me the “best knitting blog”? No. Am I highly linked? Not especially. I’m not on the first page of results for “knitting blogs”. I won my rank because yesterday my article about knitting, contained the words:

“it would look best in a soft fluffy yarn”

Since my title contains the word knitting, and my sidebar contains the word “blogs”, that meant yesterday’s page contained all three words. Of course, they didn’t appear near each other and didn’t convey the sense of “best knitting blog!.”

Let’s look at Christine’s recent blog. I used by word search tool and found she links to me and mentions her “best friend” in the side bar. Her blog title, “Knitting For Boozehags” contains knitting.

That explains it! As I understand it, Google interprets, my using “best” and linking Christine, as “voting” for Christine’s blog as “best”. Meanwhile, Christine’s “best” on the side bar, and linking me votes for me.

So, why does Google think I’m a “better” than Christine? Because Christine’s side bar appears on every single one of of her pages. My “best” only appears in the articles where I use the word.

But, now I’m using the word best again. Christine will start catching up with me. If her friends and fand read this, they will probably add “best” to their side bar. And soon, I will sink to the below. Sigh. . .