OT: Google searching and Bleacher Report
I read the Jefferson to Pistons post a couple threads down and decided to do some Google searching to see how serious the talks might be. I type in "Al Jefferson Pistons" in the news box and get a decent amount of responses as I expected. The thing I can't figure out is why the Bleacher Report seems to be among the top responses almost across the board, even in front of major news sources like msnbc.com and cnnsi.com. I dabbled a bit in search engine optimization a couple years ago and know a bit about how to get your links noticed, but not enough to fully understand why a crap site like BR constantly finds top responses in Google News. My best guess is simply the high volume of articles they pump out, but even then I am not sure. Anybody know why this might be?
Other guess, BR has been picked up by a few newspapers as a addendum to the newspaper's online content. I'm embarassed to say that the Houston Chronicle links regularly to the Bleacher Report thanks to a deal brokered a few months ago.
I have been getting a BR article towards the tops of almost all my college football searches through Google. Much of the time they are very disappointing. Within the past couple months somebody posted an article on they and they listed players they thought would start who's names I had only seen on this years official spring roster who I assume were walk-ons/practice squad judging by the positions they were. I only go there to pass time but they are starting to become less and less useful every day.
My guess is they pay for better results.
They are probably paying for top billing. As I understand it Google, Yahoo and all the other search engines accept pay for placing your website at the top. When say a subject related to your site is being searched.
It is my understanding that Google labels paid for links as "sponsored."
The Bleacher Report has a high page rank because they get a lot of links and if you are searching for sports related content with player specific names, they will likely have the content most closely related to your search.
only sponsored links show up at the top of the search results. http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=35291