We’ve had the number two result in Google for [epsom salts] for, like, ever. #1 has always been wikipedia’s page.

I know all the cool SEOs disparage PageRank, but relative measures ought to mean something — and wikipedia bests our page 6 to 4.

But as of today, the Google proxy Scroogle began showing Care2’s “13 Wonderful Ways to use Epsom Salts” article at #1. That means that at least some of Google’s datacenters are serving up our page in the top position.

Keep it coming, Google… we’ll put our foot soak / sedative bath / exfoliator up against wikipedia’s “anhydrous heptahydrate” any day. (Now that we’ve graduated from high school chemistry class, I mean.)

What happens if Googlebot drops by when you’ve taken the site down for maintenance?

In some cases, the maintenance page can get indexed!

This is a screenshot of the top result for [jobfinder], our “green jobs” listing at jobs.care2.com:

The problem is that the site got indexed by Googlebot while we had it offline. The title and snippet in the SERP came from our maintenance page, which is hosted by a secondary webserver that responds to all requests when the production websites are offline. We retained our #1 ranking for [jobfinder], despite the not-relevant title and META description.

How can this be prevented?

robots.txt could be used to disallow all spider access during maintenance, but this is not a good answer. Google caches the file’s contents, which means, first, chances are googlebot wouldn’t check the file during the maintenance window, but would instead rely on the cached contents from a previous visit. Or, if robots.txt was read from the maintenance server, googlebot might not come back to the production site for a long time (until the cache expired).

On-page NOINDEX meta tags might work, but again, these might be cached, which we don’t want to happen.

I think the best answer is to use proper HTTP header codes. We had been serving 200 OK headers from the maintenance server, which is really just incorrect.

So, we have reconfigured the webserver that hosts our maintenance page to serve HTTP 503 Service Unavailable headers. According to w3.org, HTTP 503 means:

The server is currently unable to handle the request due to a temporary overloading or maintenance of the server. The implication is that this is a temporary condition which will be alleviated after some delay.

I have not seen confirmation from Google, but after making this change I did discover a relevant thread at WMW: Pages indexed with our temporary “site update” message

I’m obsessed with rank, and you are, too, unless you’ve surfed here by accident. I use rank-tracking software to see how my pages are performing for searches on relevant keywords.

Unfortunately, it lies to me. Check out the top 10 items it finds in Google for the search [green living]; the Care2 site is listed at #7 and #8:

1. www.green-living.com/
2. www.thegreenguide.com/
3. www.thegreenguide.com/doc/122/collegetransport
4. www.nrdc.org/greenliving/
5. www.nrdc.org/greenliving/toolkit.asp
6. www.greenlivingtips.com/
7. www.care2.com/greenliving/
8. www.care2.com/greenliving/make-your-own-non-toxic-cleaning-kit.html
9. www.greenlivingjournal.com/
10. www.gliving.tv/

But look at what I get when I go to the actual Google search results — Care2 has only a single result, at #5:

1. www.green-living.com/
2. www.thegreenguide.com/
3. www.nrdc.org/greenliving/
4. www.greenlivingtips.com/
5. www.care2.com/greenliving/
6. www.greenlivingjournal.com/
7. www.gliving.tv/
8. greenliving.suite101.com/
9. greenlivingideas.com/
10. ecomall.com/greenshopping/

What’s going on?

My rank-tracker is apparently requesting 100 results at a time. Google serves different results if you request 100 of them. Not just more results — different results too.

I think that’s a problem, because the vast majority of Google users will only see 10 results. Which means my rank-tracking software is not telling me the truth.

SEO and content go hand-in-hand: if you have great content, you can get a lot of link juice for free… but if your content is lousy, you won’t be able to convince the search engines otherwise for long.

Therefore, I’m really excited to announce the launch of a wonderful new blog…
The Adventures of Green Girl

Lily Berthold-Bond is the daughter of Annie Berthold-Bond, published author and well-known expert on household toxics and all things Healthy and Green. After growing up in an eco-friendly wonderland, Lily is now a college freshman, living on her own, and facing real-life decisions about whether to continue living a natural, chemical-free lifestyle.

She has a great story to tell, and a great voice with which to tell it. Tune in for more over the coming days.

I’m awed by the simplicity of this page: Ringworm Pictures

What’s so awesome about it? It’s a 2-page blog hosted for free, with two paragraphs of text and a half-dozen pictures that seem to have been sourced from Google Images… and an AdSense ad unit. The site gets a fair amount of traffic from a link in a Wikipedia article. (Until someone notices and removes it, probably.)

So while this specific site is not adding a lot of value to the global conversation about ringworm, it’s a wonderful example of a single-purpose blog: it answers a single question, and for the people asking that question, it answers the question pretty well.

Our interests are not limited to a little residual AdSense income, though, so for us the question now becomes: how can we apply this example to a legitimate SEO effort?

In short, let’s create some blogs.

Make the content original, real and useful. Answer the important question. Provide good links to your destination site. Update the blog periodically so the content is fresh and accurate.

Here’s a good example, answering the question How can I send an ecard?

It must be said that blogs with no inbound links tend not to rank very well in search engine results, so any single such blog probably won’t be very effective. But a suite of related, interlinked, single-purpose blogs could be pretty interesting…