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LMNHP Gives Higher Rankings

Frequent readers will know that LMNHP is an acronym for a new way of handling the front page of a WordPress blog.   It gives an immediate 301 redirect to the latest post displayed as a single blog post web page.  Such readers will also know that this method gives improved search engine rankings in keyword queries.

Four SMM blogs are being tested and the search engine ranking results for all posts are being measured.  Where possible, we are also writing in these blogs about topics that are involved in very competitive keyword searches to better illustrate the improved results.  In some cases the results are so dramatic that we are also showing them in a blog post, such as this.

Perhaps the most dramatic example to date involves a keyword search for Google Adsense Split, which was covered in a recent post on this blog.  Such a search has 304,000 results so it is a relatively competitive topic.  The following is what was obtained in a keyword search for Google AdSense Split done today, May 26.  This was tested using the Google Global extension in Firefox, which checks the query in a number of different Google databases using non-personalized search.

Ignoring the first result from News search, what is most surprising is that the search engine results page (SERP) has two apparently similar items from staygolinks.com with different URLs showing as #1 and #2.  The first shows the domain itself, www.staygolinks.com, and the second is the individual post about the Google Adsense Split.

What is particularly gratifying is that the post by Danny Sullivan on Search Engine Land on which the blog post was based comes in at the #4 position.  Out-ranking such a post is a significant indication of how well the LMNHP approach works.  The order in some of the national databases was different but in all cases the Staygolinks post outranked the Danny Sullivan post.

Insights On Google’s URL Indexing

Looking more intensively into the results portrayed in the image above, we see some most intriguing behavior.

The entry for the domain is shown with a cache date and time of  24 May 2010 23:58:41 GMT. As it happens that was very shortly before a new blog post was added, which bumped the post on the Google Adsense Split off the front page of the blog.  That new blog post was published at 24 May 2010 25:22 GMT.  If it had been published two hours earlier, then its Title and meta description would be what would appear against this domain item.  However from what is seen in other keyword searches, if that new post had been indexed, then the order in the SERP would likely have been reversed to show the single post first followed by the domain.

The second indented entry for the blog post itself shows a cache date and time of 18 May 2010 00:51:22 GMT.

The blog post that now appears if you go to the domain and are redirected (Professional Writers Blogs Are More Visible With LMNHP) has been indexed and does appear in relevant keyword searches.  However the URL for the individual post is attached to that listing in such  keyword searches, rather than the URL for the domain. 

How Google indexes URLs and the content to be found there may always change, but it would appear that the following happens based on the cache dates.  On a first pass, the spider indexes the URL to which it is redirected together with the content there.  On a second pass, the spider indexes the domain itself since there was no record on the previous pass and uses the redirected content for that URL.  This description must be taken as highly speculative, but is perhaps a most intriguing glimpse into what may be happening.

Technorati Tags: Adsense, Danny Sullivan, lmnhp, Search Engine Land, SERP