Richard BF

Not often, but every now and again I get a little guilty about my Google ranking for a particular query. At the moment I’m getting a lot of folks looking up The Clarence Hotel in Petersham, which is our new Sydney Scared Scriptless Theatresports venue. Unfortunately though, I don’t blog that much about it, even though I’m sort of directing or producing the show or something like that.

I mean we have a Scared Scriptless web site, which is unfortunately not really functional at the moment, but it will be up real soon now. Ryan?

But for news about the shows, people are still somehow finding their way to my blog, and certainly the first paragraph of this post isn’t going to change that too much. At least the title isn’t going to top things off.

The thing about Google, is that it is supposed to level the playing field, find the things you need, with the rankings you want, filter out those who are trying to stack things in their favor, and everyone’s happy. The problem of course is that most people don’t actually understand the mechanics and structure required of a good site to support Google and it’s peers, meaning that to keep a level playing field, I should really dumb down my site’s data quality.

But then who am I to complain if I get a higher ranking? If my Google referers are anything to go by, I should keep writing for my audience of people interested in Kristy Kreme (check the spelling), Oriental Lillies, How to win lotto and of course Scared Scriptless in Sydney.

The answer of course is for web site authors to do it right the first time, a good starting point being Gina Trapani’s Scribbling.net post on helping Googlebot to understand your site.