Netscrap top queries

By: Chris Greacen - 01/13/2008
I was plunking around the Google Webmasters tool the other day and noticed that they provide some details about the query terms that include netscrap in the results.

Here are a few first place finishes:

• Stuff and Things
• If Microsoft Made Cars which links to the ever popular 689
• Netscrap (of course)

Some top 10 hits that I didn't expect to find:

• Saduki which refers to the 1999 Darwin Awards
• Bill Gates Hometown which hits the classic Bill Gates' house tidbits
• Diamond Necklesses for a Rap Translation
• Pub Quizz a typo! Ha!
• in kentucky usa it is illegal to carry "ice cream" in your back pocket -- huh? Some trivia about American Law

In any case, it's nice to see that there there are a bunch of high-scoring pages. Remember, this site has been basically untouched for 10 years. I attribute these high-ranking pages to a few simple practices:

1. consistent use of basic meta tags: keywords especially.
2. longevity of the domain: goog is supposed to goose the pagerank for domains that aren't fly-by-night
3. consistent urls: for the past decade there have been a pile of sites that link to netscrap.com. I never changed my urls! So every ancient hello-world page that some pimply kid (who now runs facebook et al) linked to netscrap.com still collecting dust on some (geocities, tripod, etc.) server still links to a valid page. It's still helping!

Yes, I could still beef up the meta tags, use of the

title="" element in links, and clean up urls to be more seo-friendly to boost pagerank further. And sure, the site isn't in the top slice of sites on the net anymore. But it's trucking along with a marketing budget of $0.