How (the hell) did my blog rank 5th in Google?

Regarding Google page ranking, it is well-known that:

  •  Google gives poor rankings to new web sites
  • It has higher page ranks for sites that have a lot of quality incoming links
  • It monitors traffic, so that sites with higher traffic have higher page ranks

Now, consider that:

  • I started my blog site on 20th April (less than 2 weeks ago)
  • My blog has ZERO incoming links (as of now)
  • The traffic on my blog is less than a hundred visitors per day

In this situation, I was shocked when I casually searched for "colony collapse disorder update" on Google and found my blog to be the 5th result on the 1st page! Here's a snapshot:

my-blog-in-google-search.jpg
Note: The "Personalized Results" refer to the restriction of results to English.

Why are these age-old truths about Google page ranking not working in this case? What else is pushing my blog posts up the ranking order? Any insights would certainly be appreciated!

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May 2, 2007 – 11:17 AM | By Mahendra | Posted in blogging | Tagged | Comments (4)

4 Comments

  • Pareen wrote:
    May 7, 2007 at 9:57 PM

    I think you are for­get­ting the most impor­tant fac­tor here…

    First and fore­most is the con­tent, tags, title ofthe page that is considered…

    your page’s con­tent matches the key­words typed in…and that is the most impor­tant factor…the place­ment of ‘the key­words’ (here, colony col­lapse dis­or­der update) on YOUR page…

    all that lorelle has men­tioned comes later on…placing the right key­words at the right places (title, con­tent, tags, etc.) is a part of what is called Seach Engine Optimization…

    cor­rect me if I am wrong…

  • mahendrap wrote:
    May 8, 2007 at 6:16 PM

    Hi Pareen,

    Yes, page con­tent does mat­ter, of course, but the SEO experts seem to sug­gest that new sites and sites hav­ing no incom­ing links may be ignored by Google (irre­spec­tive of con­tent). That’s why I was surprised.

    But I think your point is prov­ing cor­rect — look­ing at the search terms peo­ple are using to come to my blog, it does seem that con­tent rules, after all! :-)

    Thanks for shar­ing your thoughts,
    Mahendra

  • Pareen wrote:
    May 9, 2007 at 1:10 PM

    Even I was a bit sur­prised last month (when the same hap­pened on my blog) and had con­sulted a few expe­ri­enced blog­gers about it…

  • Sandra Todd wrote:
    Apr 2, 2009 at 3:54 PM

    I will tell you why you site ranked for those key words: if you look around the web, you will find that there are hardly no other sites with that key­word. That makes yours stand out.

    Here’s an exam­ple: if I google the title of my blog post, I’m very likely to be ranked #1 for my post title key­word because there’s likely to be no other site with the exact keyword.

    Now, that’s some­thing you should chew over.