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November 14, 2005

The Highest Ranked Site on the Internet

Reading the SocialText blog recenty, I came across a post from Sept 30th which talks about the reasons Wikipedia is the highest ranked site on the Internet. While I thought some of the logic in the post was flawed, it did point out the double wildcard operator (*+*) as a method to determine the total number of sites indexed by Google.

The logic of this set of operators eludes me. Wildcards in Google are supposed to go in quotes, like "sunny day *", and one would think two wildcards would match any two words, not any number of words.

However, if this search does return every page in Google, ranked by importance, then hats off to Keio University, who fairly dominate with 8 of the top 14 listings (for us Yanks, they're sort of like the Harvard of Japan). The homepage is one of the few PageRank 10's I've seen in some time.

What's their secret? Looks like cohosting the W3C played a big role. Their backlinks are littered with links from some of the best and brightest in web development resource sites, mainly from those sites reprinting documentation from the W3C.

This is a testament to the power of building business relationships when it comes to SEO. It's not in the code, it's not the number of link swaps or directory submissions. It's all about who you know. Or who you can afford to know.

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