I lost my pagerank

June 5, 2009 10:19 PM

What's going on with my Home of the Underdogs revival Google rank?

Until today http://www.hotud.org was the 2nd returned listing for a google search of "home of the underdogs". (Below wikipedia)

Now I'm not anywhere to be seen. Like 3 pages in at the best and the first real link is to a dead revival project...

What gives? What can I do to fix this?

posted by Lord_Pall to Technology (20 answers total)

It's result #2 for me.
posted by zippy at 10:45 PM on June 5, 2009

Clarification - it's result #2 for me when I search for the phrase in quotes.
posted by zippy at 10:46 PM on June 5, 2009

Response by poster: I don't get any returns when I search for it. The closest I get is the 3rd page at the bottom links back to the forum, but nothing linking to the main page...

:(
posted by Lord_Pall at 10:48 PM on June 5, 2009

It's also on the third page (#24) for me too, and the link goes to the forum instead of the main site.
posted by tachikoma_robot at 10:55 PM on June 5, 2009

Response by poster: Yeah, so what gives?

And what can I do to fix that, especially since all of the other links just go to dead sites or revivals that aren't active anymore..
posted by Lord_Pall at 10:57 PM on June 5, 2009

For me, "home of the underdogs" is the second result, too, like what zippy says. Maybe it's a momentary Google bug?
posted by suedehead at 11:10 PM on June 5, 2009

Google pagerank is not a static thing - the algorithms are continually being tweaked - and their servers are not synchronised. FWIW, your page is #1 for me, without quotes.

It could be that your site was recently linked from some sites Google has decided are spammy, it could be that the Almighty Google has suffered a brain fart, or it could be the will of the Great Gods of Google. They don't disclose how pagerank works, so any answer you get here will be pure conjecture.

Besides being somewhat self-linky, anyone so concerned about their Google Pagerank changing from day to day would be much better served reading one of the many fine blogs and forums that are focused on dissecting How Google Works...
posted by Pinback at 11:18 PM on June 5, 2009

with the quotes I'm getting hotud as #2, without the quotes I'm getting www.homeoftheunderdogs.net as #2.

I think the presence of the original site is jamming the rankings.
posted by @troy at 11:23 PM on June 5, 2009

If you have a little grayed-out up-arrow next to your search results, you can click that and it'll make whatever you selected the first search result whenever you look for it. If you encourage enough people to do that, Google might take notice (though I think they've publicly said that they aren't using that feature in that way yet).
posted by Conrad Cornelius o'Donald o'Dell at 11:26 PM on June 5, 2009

Erm, I just tried, non-logged-in and cookie-free, and I got it as first hit, with or without quotes. Googlers reading AskMe?
posted by themel at 12:32 AM on June 6, 2009

I get you as no 1 with quotes, and 3rd page without.
posted by the_epicurean at 12:45 AM on June 6, 2009

It could also be geographic - google serves up different results depending on your location.
posted by rodgerd at 2:03 AM on June 6, 2009

(I also don't see hotud on the first page, incidentally)
posted by rodgerd at 2:03 AM on June 6, 2009

It's #1 for me. Where are you that it's not coming up? Are you using "Google.com in English"?
posted by dunkadunc at 4:59 AM on June 6, 2009

That is, the results come up differently if you use the international English version of Google- I see you're in Finland so I'd give it a shot.

(longtime Underdogs fan here, btw.)
posted by dunkadunc at 5:08 AM on June 6, 2009

You come up for me as the #1 result when in quotes. But, you DO come in on page 3 when not in quotes. I think this is because there are quite a few discussions about the different sites, but more importantly there are like 3 versions of HOTU going on. The first result when not in quotes is the dot net page which looks like the original site. Since there was a post there a few months ago, perhaps that has altered the number of links going to it, thus influencing the pagerank.

I think you could start to "fix" it by improving your PageRank, which you can do by getting legit links from legit websites with reasonable pageranks themselves. Basically, make your site more out there, go to the results of the unquoted search and if it's a live forum, go and make your own post about your HOTU version without being spammy of course. If you could do it as a reply to the original post, those doing the unquoted search may come to your site eventually, which will help improve your rankings. Of course, Google works in mysterious ways and I'm not an expert, I'm sure there are others out there.
posted by Meagan at 5:20 AM on June 6, 2009

That's odd. I was just looking for that site last night! My search was 'the underdogs games' (no quotes), and although you're second, I clicked on the Wikipedia entry because I was pretty sure that hotud.org was not the url I remembered. I did click on it from Wikipedia, though. Glad to see that site up and running, nice work. :D
posted by WowLookStars at 6:37 AM on June 6, 2009

One more data point: Without quotes, I get wikipedia first, homeoftheunderdogs.net second, and your site third. With quotes, wikipedia still comes first, then your site second, then the old url third.
posted by ook at 6:48 AM on June 6, 2009

Hi Lord_Pall, since you're here i'd like to ask you if you are going to be able to revive the old hotu game rankings. Thanks for doing this, btw.
posted by CautionToTheWind at 7:02 AM on June 6, 2009

Actually i meant ratings rather than rankings.
posted by CautionToTheWind at 7:06 AM on June 6, 2009