"Special Rankings" - How do you get them?

[Yorganic]

I'm talking about the ones where you search for a prominent brand or company e.g. if you search for "the times" you get the UK Times Newspaper online version. Results that look something like this:

The Times
A global view on world, UK and business news and comment from The Times and Sunday Times.
www.timesonline.co.uk/ - Similar pages
Search Timesonline - http://sitesearch.timesonline.co.uk/
Sport - http://www.timesonline.co.uk/sport
the sunday times newspaper edition - http://www.timesonline.co.uk/section...
Sunday Times - http://www.timesonline.co.uk/sundaytimes
More results from www.timesonline.co.uk »

This seems to work for specific HTML pages, subdirectories and directories.

Is it something to do with 'click throughs' or ratio of inbound links to the #2 ranking result?

Or, is it manual and can you apply for such a listing?

There also must be several newspapers round the world called 'the times' so how do the UK times have such listings but not other newspapers?

Do you get the same result wherever you are - i.e. do you see what I see in the UK for 'the times'

How does it work for small companies e.g. I know Paramo aren't a big company but they get special treatment.

Why dosen't it work for Patagonia? I know its a place but they do own the brand. Yet, it does work for "patagonia clothing"

Why doesn't it happen for us when we own the unique brand "yorganic" ?

[kash_da_seo]

I think, it is upto Google. They only decide which site to show with this kind of result.

I was also wondering about this sort of result, when one of my client wanted it. I still don't have any idea how google ranks website and show this result. Any specific information from some Google Guru is highly appriciated.

Thanks.

[Mong]

Recently google has strated doing this and only authority website gets these many links ranking on #1 at the same time. :)

[Yorganic]

Thanks guys but what is an "authority" and is it a manual assessment by Google or an automagical one.

[Jobs.com.sg]

I am guessing that the site must be a past or current paying Adwords advertiser ? :confused: :confused:

[hubel]

I am guessing that the site must be a past or current paying Adwords advertiser ? :confused: :confused:

No that's not the case. I have a site with these extra links shown and I have never used Adwords for it.

[Yorganic]

Bump..... Come on guys - someone must have a definitive answer on this.

[thegypsy]

Definitive? I thought this was a Google Board? Lol

Anyways from what I have seen, read and theorized it seems to be as stated here an authority site (possible some TrustRank action?).

Having multiple #1 rankings is an unlikely one as many sites have many #1’s. It would certainly have to be ‘related’ to competitiveness which goes back to basically being an ‘authority site’

If you’re playing along at home here is a quick explanation for Trust Rank;

'[0020] TrustRank is a link analysis technique related to PageRank. TrustRank is a
method for separating reputable, good pages on the Web from web spam.
TrustRank is based on the presumption that good documents on the Web seldom
link to spam. TrustRank involves two steps, one of seed selection and another of
score propagation. The TrustRank of a document is a measure of the likelihood
that the document is a reputable (i.e., a nonspam) document.'

By no means ‘definitive’ of course… just a snippet.

That’s the direction I am leaning at this point. Things do change though.

[Yorganic]

Hi Gypsy,

Thanks for the reply. OK have just read up a summary of TrustRank and downloaded the full paper: http://dbpubs.stanford.edu:8090/pub/2004-17 I'll report back when [if ever] I digest it. At first glance it appears to be more about identifying spam rather than ranking.

I am intrigued as to whether it is fully automated part of their algorithm or commences with a manual intervention.

If I had to build such an algorithm [hey!] then maybe I'd be looking at the ratio of inbound links for the top ranking site versus the site below. Eg you have two commercial sites and one has 100 inbound links for a keyword and the next ranking sites all have 10 links or below. Big deal - ratio of 10:1 and a typical situation where the top site has been optimised but if that ratio gets above 100:1 then that would indicate the top ranking site holds some power for that keyword that is out of reach of the other sites.

Then combine that with excessive click through ratios above the other sites for the same keywords you maybe have a trusted site.

However, all that goes out of the window for my site where the company name is more less a unique brand UNLESS Google then discounts all sites where there are so few searches for that keyword i.e. the only people who search for "yorganic" are those that know us and whereas Id like that to be a big number it is in reality very small.

The one thing all the examples I can think of do have in common that I have checked is that they are showing in Google trends. My site of course is not! Again that would indicate keyphrases above a certain threshold.

[kirby009]

I make sense to keep all top brand names first , if they didn't the internet wouldn't be worth anything.

[ClothMaker111]

I have a number of websites that get that special ranking, so the best I can offer is what they have in common. I don't think we can get much more definitive than that, as Google has never officially commented on the practice, at least to my knowledge.

- They are all at least four years old.
- They have more than 100 pages indexed
- They are very high traffic (200,000+ uniques per month)
- They show up as #1 for highly-searched-for terms <-- This is important

The site in my signature is an example. Feel free to analyze away.

[cmonline]

hey - all answered in this thread: http://forums.digitalpoint.com/showthread.php?t=137299

in a nutshell it is automatic and algorithm based...

[Yorganic]

Thanks cmonline and clothmaker,

I would like to clarify that I was not asking as I expect to get one of these listsing for me. One of my clients now has one and he wants me to explain how I got it for him!

I just find it really annoying when something cannot be explained. At least with something like Page Rank you can go away and read the patent and have half an idea.

On that note may I say thank you to the moderator for supplying me with an infraction[!] and would like to point out the mitigating circusmtances:

I asked a REAL question and did not get a straight answer first time round.
I did do a board search [and a google search] beforehand but the problem with that is you have to know what to call something to get a result and, this is something relatively new.
Maybe if this board was moderated better you could have pointed to the previous post first straight away.


But, again the previous post was less definitive than the answer supplied by clothmaker - once again. thanks

[Goodssupplier]

Google have his own rule which rank the website, maybe big company have good bank!