chinakay wrote:
Considering Google's left-leaning anti-gun stance how do you get to come up in a search at all?
Work, and luck. Ellegon.com already had a google ranking before 2003, when it was just my writing website, and I made the decision to do the carry permit and political advocacy stuff off of that, rather than start a new website. Lucky choice, as that turned out.
That helped.
And it worked for quite a while, until the server where ellegon.com used to live up and died a couple of months ago. Pretty quickly, I dropped entirely off of Google -- the bots didn't like the site being gone, quite reasonably.
And rather than just moving all of the gun stuff to Twincitiescarry.com, when I moved stuff to Dreamhost (with a LOT of help from DDB), I also moved the ellegon.com domain, so my present Google ranking appears to be influenced by my pre-crash Google ranking.
Beyond that, Google's algorithms appear to be sensitive to, among other things:
Text. They like a lot of text; I've done a fair number of essays, and updated them, sometimes pretty frequently.
Headers. Descriptive headers seem to help a lot.
Meta-tags. Useful, but easy to get yourself in trouble for overdoing. I try to put in as many legitimate ones as I can, and make sure to put in nothing that's intended to be bot-bait. (No "Sex, hot hobbit-on-hobbit action," etc.)
Links. Google likes links; I link to some other sites that I think are relevant (not always good; I link to
Rebecca Thoman's website, after all) and a fair number of people link back to me.
I don't guarantee that any or all of that will work, but it seems to have worked for me -- combined, as I said, with a fair amount of luck.