The once and future king of capitol hill seattle

By jseattle

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As online search more and more defines the way we learn about our world and Google more and more defines search, being the first result for a Google search defines success/fail for a web site. For a neighborhood blog, this means earning the top slot for the neighborhood's key keyword. It's an honor. And it's good for bidness.

So it hurts to announce we are giving up our top slot for capitol hill seattle. Go ahead. Search for it. We're gone. We were #1 for over a year. And now we're #30. Page 3.

So, why give up this power, this mark that we were the most useful result for human beings looking to learn about this Seattle neighborhood?

It's the price we pay for our new independence. For our first two years of existence, CHS lived on Google's Blogger platform. It was a good home but we didn't, to continue the metaphor, own the land. It was Google's URL. If we want to own our destiny completely, we needed to be re-born as Capitolhillseattle.com. So we made the break. And here we are.

Problem was Google was very attached to our old home and even with the new site growing and gathering new neighbors, the search giant continued to point at our old address as the top result for capitol hill seattle. We had a new party going on but Google kept talking about the old days. It was a drag and, we think, likely to continue on that way for a long, long time. Our only choice was to add a special little tag to the old site that told Google's robots to buzz off and stop talking about the old site.

Today, Google has finally listened. The #1 slot is back up for grabs -- enjoy it, Wikipedia, while it lasts. We know Google will come back to us, eventually. We'll earn the top slot again the way we did the first time -- writing about Capitol Hill every day, writing interesting and original posts, writing Capitol Hill Capitol Hill Capitol Hill. A lot. Capitol Hill. See?

In the meantime, we're on results page 3. We have some decent company in Elderwise and The Stranger's Capitol Hill Block Party coverage. But we're not sticking around there for long.

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tags: blogs, internet, nerd + add tags

posted on Tue, Jul 22, 2008 01:45 PM

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even worse bylinder seattle1 month ago	(0 votes) (report abuse) (reply)
CHS was on page 4 @ #30 when I just searched. PS: When you search on - capitAl hill seattle - CHS doesn't show up until page 8 - #80.

Fix it! bysomething else1 month ago	(0 votes) (report abuse) (reply)
Can't we fix this with a 'bomb', like American foreign policy? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_bomb

SEO bySEO1 month ago	(0 votes) (report abuse) (reply)
Try adding a description and keywords in your tags on the home page. This is huge in my experience and google looks at it alot for descriptions. You'll notice if you go to the two top pages that both of there meta descriptions tags have Capitol Hill as the first two words in the description tag Wiki's Meta Tags About.com's meta tags

Whoo! byfinal answer1 month ago	(0 votes) (report abuse) (reply)
Hillku is still the #1 result when you search for 'hillku'! What will happen if we ever switch over to hillku.com (which we own, btw, but are too incompetent to figure out).

	RE: Whoo! bysomething else1 month ago	(0 votes) (report abuse)
	Yikes Hillku! hill ku dot blog spot dot com is a nice seven syllable URL. hill ku dot com is an ugly four.

	RE: Whoo! byfinal answer1 month ago	(0 votes) (report abuse)
	Well that settles it. hill ku dot blog spot dot com 4ever!

SEO 2x byMvB1 month ago	(0 votes) (report abuse) (reply)
Srsly, J, get with the program. What kind of SEO work is this:

SEO redux byMvB1 month ago	(0 votes) (report abuse) (reply)
I just noticed that the html doesn't display in the comment field, of course. But yes, your page description meta tag has got to start "Capitol Hill Seattle..." and so does the keywords tag.

	RE: SEO redux byjseattle1 month ago	(0 votes) (report abuse)
	That's so cheesy. Google is worth $150 billion because of tags like that? I don't buy it. Google is making us earn it. Still, I hope the boys over at Centraldistrictnews who write this code are ready for a boatload of work items.

the seo meta tag myth bygregor samsa1 month ago

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meta tags as panace for seo is a myth; while not totally ignored, meta tags do not hold much weight for page rank. because the site has a new domain and is not linked to by other blogs (yet), naturally the ranking is lower. over time as external links increase and the volume of content on the site goes up, the google page rank will reflect this.

basically, with a new site/url, you have to re-establish your rep with search engines as a relevant site. just takes time.

http://www.modernlifeisrubbish.co.uk/article/5-myths-in-seo

You told them to bug off? byGalen1 month ago	(0 votes) (report abuse) (reply)
Not to continue classifying you as number one and pointing all that traffic over to this site? Maybe it's more technical than it sounds?

	RE: You told them to bug off? byjseattle1 month ago	(0 votes) (report abuse)
	it is more technical than that. Added a noindex tag to the old site. I want the engines to look at the content we moved here, not at the old location.

#1 on Live.com bymicherz1 month ago	(0 votes) (report abuse) (reply)
At least you're still number one at www.live.com!

more seo byjoey1 month ago

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actually, google doesn't use keywords but it's good to put them there for older search engines (i think altavista uses them still or something?). Try putting the words Capitol Hill Seattle before CHS in your title.

But definitely do add a meta description because when people DO find you on google, or other search engines, the description is most likely the next text that google finds which is probably a post or something. Better to create a more accurate description of the site and it might help with rankings a bit as well.

My free of charge advice though is that your title is number one for rankings if you're doing everything right. You can analyze your meta tags to see if they match the content right which also helps improve rankings. http://www.seocentro.com/tools/search-engines/metatag-analyz