The statistics for search engine terms that bring internet trawlers onto the Isaac Brock Society web site show that only one search counts for much at all: the three words “isaac brock society.” A known-item search …
I poked into this findability topic after monitoring and testing search functionality over at the InfoShop. At this point Google has crawled around the InfoShop — a phrase search [wrap it in quotation marks] for a pithy bit like “longstanding american exceptionalism” will demonstrate that.
The words that worried expatriate Americans seem likely to stab into their keyboards will not connect them in any easy fashion with either Isaac Brock Society or with the InfoShop. Launch a few verbal forays and see for yourself. Stabbing into the dark.
Inscrutability of the Google algorithm and how to achieve higher rank may not be the question. The usual primary search hook used by usxcanada reels in http://expatsinca.wordpress.com/ as hit number three. Of course, Expats in Canada has been going since October 2011, and longevity does count with the Algorithm.
But still. Content. Traffic. Multiplicity. Activity. Growth. Volume. There are so many other factors.
Are searches being impeded? Are rankings being manipulated? Is this site being concealed? Is this thinking paranoid?
We all know that Isaac Brock Society is the place to be for anxious extraterritorial Americans. And those Google engineers do not have a black box that figures this out?
How did you yourself meet up with Isaac Brock Society? Here’s betting that either you saw the link in a blog posting somewhere, or someone else told you about it.
This state of affairs could pose an outreach problem. Hundreds of thousands in Canada are affected, millions worldwide. Meanwhile, Isaac Brock Society traffic presently trickles upward past 3,000 hits in one day.
What do you think?
Well, I heard about this site on the old Expat Forum before they started drumming out the censorship. I’m not sure how I would have found this site otherwise, but it is getting cross-linked to other blogs more and more and the increased hit count and user base is slowly spreading the word. I originally found the old expat forum by doing a search for “renounce US citizenship”. A similar search nowadays produces lots of variants of that awful “AllGov” article, which is worrying.
Any kid writing a school report on Isaac Brock will find this site though since just searching “Isaac Brock” on Google, for example, shows this as the third result. Not sure how that helps though of course!
Google modifies your search results depending on how much it knows about you (your IP, whether you’re logged in with your all-seeing ultrapersistent Google cookie, etc.). If i search for expat fbar, I get isaacbrocksociety.com at #8 or #9, both when I’m anonymized (over Tor with an exit node in Germany, no cookies) and through a plain unsecured search (my own IP, logged in). For a search just on FATCA, Petros & Isaac Brock don’t show up until the third page either
One thing we can definitely do to improve the Google rankings is to include more internal links (e.g. when you are writing a blog post here, link some key words and phrases to other posts on isaacbrocksociety.com) and to use the keywords you want to rank for in your post title (so it becomes part of the URL). E.g. notice that none of the last five post titles mention FATCA, FBAR, citizenship taxation, etc. The trouble is that for regular readers this looks repetitive and even forced, but it helps a lot in the rankings. I do this a lot on my personal blog. I have a blog post from five years ago that ranks #1 for “learn korean in hong kong” basically because of this. It beats out a bunch of commercial organisations (schools, tutors, language exchange websites) who would love to be in the top spot because they actually make money from it.
The stakes for searches on FATCA are much higher than, e.g. language schools: every cross-border professional wants to be on top, there’s a lot more money involved, and so they are all doing very aggressive SEO and some of them are quite good at it (or have the money to pay people who are). I’m at the #2 or #3 spot for “korea fatca”. I can usually break onto the first page for “china fatca” the day or two after I post about it, but then I fall back down quickly because it’s a more competitive set of keywords.
I’ve never been able to tell how much Twitter helps with Google ranking. I know a lot of us like Just Me and nobledreamer are on twitter and posting links.
@Eric
Thank you for the clarification – I hadn’t realised that Google was doing that on this computer since this computer is supposed to not save any search history ever (company policy). I imagine that the issue was that I was logged into a gmail account, and that the new Google “feature” of linking Youtube, search history and Gmail all into one was importing my search history as well somehow. Very annoying.
Anyway, I also received Isaac Brock Society as number 8 on the list after I closed the browser and did not log into to Gmail. I imagine with time that it will slowly creep up to the top. I personally really like the subheading “Liberty and justice for all United States persons in Canada and abroad” and the choice of a Canadian hero for the site, but anything to increase site hits is also a good thing. Maybe the sub-heading could be expanded or modified to somehow include the keywords FBAR, FATCA and IRS or whatever. Somebody could also create a Facebook group I guess, but I imagine that that would unwillingly bring in a lot of “Wall of Shame” types…
Almost 61,000 hits at the time of writing though – That’s brilliant for 46 days!
How about something like “Liberty and Justice for all US persons abroad facing the injustice of FATCA, FBAR and the IRS” to increase hits? 😛
I’ve been meaning to do a post on the subject of how to increase our reputation. For Google, I’ve learned that the top way to increase priority in searches is to increase Pagerank. This requires external links to our site. From the beginning we started leaving links whereever we can. Two days ago was our biggest day. It came with over 100 hits from Daniel Mitchel’s blog. He permits hyperlinks. Other sites will allow you to name drop only. That name dropping, is the reason we get so many searches for “Isaac Brock Society”.
May I ask everyone who wants to increase our traffic to continue to drop links into other sites, especially ones that will draw traffic to us. I am not of the belief that something sinister is going on. We are very young site. It takes time to establish a reputation. Consider our Alexa ranking. We just passed the 10 million mark, yet our traffic is now at 30 times that of my own blog which stands at around 5 million.
Now when the Expat Forum began to censor the discussion in November, I suggested to a few others to begin another discussion somewhere else. For the first few weeks, Expat Forum was our top referrer. But they continued their moderating (i.e., censorship) and have pretty much lost their traffic to us–(by the way, we broke no rules in doing this. This is a blog not a forum, and everyone who referred to it was personally involved in it, despite what Bob Sheth later claimed.) They called themselves a “Forum” but I’m not sure what censorship has to do with “open discussion”, the dictionary meaning of “Forum”. When they realized that Isaac Brock would take their traffic away, they began to do crazy things, including doing a global search and replace in their data base to all the links to us–even in private messages one person told me! Now if you want to find the Isaac Brock Society, you can’t hyperlink to us–you must use google. I think that accounts for many of the searches for our name which still exists in many of the posts at Expat Forum, last I checked. We receive no further hits from them, but for the first couple weeks they were our top referrer.
@Petros
Expat Forum censorship wasn’t just linked to these issues here. I once posted a help page from a blog on bank account types in Italy in the Italy Forum for someone who needed more info on how to open an account and was finding it difficult to find information in English. The link that I posted was removed immediately and I was given an infraction point for sending members towards “competing” websites. The master rule of the Expat Forum is that you can’t share any outside information there, since that might bring down their hit count!
THERE IS something sinister when you google “renounce US citizenship” because there are hundreds of thousands of hits about “superman renouncing US citizenship”.
Maybe it’s just coincidental, but it happened during a time that renunciations were on the rise.
It’s easy to rememdy though, all it takes is “-superman” in the search box.
@geeeez
Similarly, If you search “renounce Us citizenship” in Google News you have to filter out “Jamaica” and sometimes “Taiwan”, otherwise you’ll often only see hundreds of stories about the same 3-4 MPs renouncing US citizenship to be able to stand for office.
I think the Superman phenomena was just more widespread and was widely discussed in the US press, leading to the increased number of hits on Google. I personally doubt that Google is part of some sort of conspiracy to restrict searches and content, but I wouldn’t put it past the US (or any other) government to be behind pressure to restrict results. It remains to be seen what will happen when the horrifying ACTA goes live worldwide I suppose.
@Don, given the US secrecy, you can only imagine they are are up to no good, and are probably already doing something.
They may be a good post for you to do since I doubt most people on the blog know about the ACTA.
What is ACTA?
@Don
“The link that I posted was removed immediately and I was given an infraction point for sending members towards “competing” websites.”
You’ve got to be kidding me. Those people are fools.
I once had my knuckles rapped for writing in French in a forum to French people. I was told that an “international” forum meant English. However I was backed up by the organizers so it came to nothing. Nasty wake up call though…
@ Victoria: The Expat Forum is a business venture, and they are very strict about their rules–including the rule about no foreign languages. My sole infraction before I was kicked off for telling Expat Forum Moderator jokes was for posting a note in French to Pacifica, who wrote a French post not realizing that it was infraction. Both of us were censured and censored for that act of French writing.
My putting up of Mr. Jeff Tomas’ post in French was an act of defiance to the monolingualism of the of English-only Expat Forum. You see, JoJo (my favourite Expat Forum Moderator), you cannot control free-speech, except on your little corner of the internet. Cheers.
@Petros Hear! Hear! I have a suggestion, why not write ACA an email and ask them to put Isaac Brock on their Links page?
@ Jeff: I leave the promotion of Isaac Brock to others. If recommend that you or anyone else who likes the idea do that very thing. ACA has already given us a nod on their Facebook site. Also Roger Conklin, who is frequent commenter here is on the board of ACA.
@Petros I just made a google search with keyword “fatca fbar” and Isaac Brock comes up forth or fifth. If I use “fatca” or “fbar” alone, it does not appear to come up on the first results page.