Here are the facts and embedded questions: - Was able to push my blog up to #10 on Google for the phrase -> stock market - but fell back to #11. Okay, I thought this would be a high traffic key phrase - but it isn't - or does not seem to be. Is 18 referrals from Google search a day count as high traffic? Any ideas about what is going on? Or did I just pick a really bad phrase? I guess the game is in the long-tail? - This is what gets me about Google sometimes. Scan the front page for the search term - stock market - do you see the entry for "StockMaster at MIT"? Click it and look at the yummy goodness of high quality content that is on that page... But it has been there for years! I know, I know - it is at MIT. So, is Google REALLY looking at the content of pages or just the links to the pages, because I just don't see it here.
18 referrals from google is not a big number. Your keyword is not a hot one. For the ranking, goolge will look the page content for keywords, but will not read the content. Search "PowerISO Tutorial"in google, my page is there, but my site has nothing with that.
I'd say that 'stock market' is in itself too broad to be a good search term beyond the top 3-5 postions. 'stock market tips' 'stock market trends' and such would probably be better traffic. But you are halfway there... ai.mit.edu/stocks.html redirects with a 302 status code to ai.mit.edu/redirects/stocks.html. Notice they share the same cache and backlinks. Google is not accepting that the final landing page is really a different url... Why does it rank? It's really old, and so are the links. Many are from .edu sites. It's getting ranking juice for 'stock market' based on the anchor text alone. It won't go away because a 302 status code is temporary, and Google is expecting a high quality on-topic non-spammy page about 'stock market' there again. Stupid Google. It's been gone since at least 1997 according to archive.org... the headers say the landing page was last modified Thu, 02 May 1996.
Thanks! I think you answered all my questions. I should have done more research on that key phrase - live and learn! Yeah - I knew that MIT page was old with a bunch of (aged) high quality links to it - it just seems to point out the over dependence of Google on links. Excellent feedback - thanks!
Google puts blinders on when it runs into 302 redirects like that... especially when it comes to high trust sites. The average site would probably not fare as well.