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Astoundingly High Google Ranks Reflect Oasis's Depth and Breadth of Unique, Authoritative Content

Historical google ranks for oasisdesign.net pre-individualized search.

Alas, the google algorithm has changed, and now there's often pages and pages of content, much of which has been scraped from our site or books, that comes up before our original material :-(

How We Got Lots of Google Juice

We've poured hundreds of pages of free, unique authoritative content on a wide variety of sustainability-related topics onto the web since 1997. It has now reached some sort of critical threshold for trustworthy, authoritative-ness, and now basically anything we write about is top-ranked in Google.

(Besides writing a lot of unique material people want to read—far and away the main factor, we organized and search-engine-optimized it according to principles summarized in part on our Web design page.)

I noticed that more and more, I'd be searching on information on this or that and our own pages will come up. It gradually dawned on me that the world wide web isn't my own hard drive, and that this meant we were successfully competing against over 25 billion other pages for these top spots (!!!)

Google loves Oasis because people love Oasis's content. The Google algorithm favors unique content that people find useful. The worth of our pages is reflected in some astonishingly votes of confidence; we were number one for "legalize sustainability," for example, a month after we put it up, without a single incoming link that we know of.

We've had our minds blown consistently by how Google finds Oasis so authoritative on such a breadth of topics...so we figured it was about time we share the news with our readers.

How Much Google Juice Is That?

Recently, we started recording our rank on various terms...here's a small sample:

Bear in mind...this is a tiny home office, with zero marketing budget, no SEO gimmicks, competing against every other web site on the planet!

There can't be many organizations that have anything like this high of google ranks per employee, per dollar of organizational budget, or number of web pages.

Sure some of these searches are pretty softball. But, we didn't include most of searches in which we have too big of an innate advantage (Slots 1 through 9600 for Create an Oasis with Greywater, refer to our book by that name, for example). On the other hand, some of these searches here are for real common terms (wholesale price list), and/or well outside the areas we are most known for (dengue fever information, drum dance circles...). For example, we now have two pages, total, on web design, and this one is #25 out of 75,300,000 for the search high google ranks and #1 for the same thing in quotes.

We have gone through a lot of incredulity that this ranks can actually be real. We've speculated that Google is personalizing results, if not by google account, then by geographic area, or search history. However, these results repeat on all our computers, our friends computers, i phones that have never been before connected to the oasis web site, and, finally, our latest test, which consisted of borrowing the computer of a random guy at an internet cafe in Maine, 3000 miles from here, who had never heard of us.

(Note, these ranks are mostly from the time we first checked in 2010. The ranks seem to be all over the place these days. We did our best to depersonalize search results for these ranks (no personal results, geologcation off in browser). If you have any personalization, that will change the ranks. You can find our pages within the search results by searching in the page for oasis. Add quotes to the search, and our rank skyrockets for almost every search. All the ranks here are for searches without quotes except the ones with quotes shown here.)

List of Ranks We Checked

Ecological Design and Building

Personal Finance

Graywater

Water Storage

Water quality

Health

Toilets

Transportation

Alternative Lifestyle

Business

and finally...

 

See also: