The website for the Talent Oregon Coffee Shop called the Whistle Stop Coffee Shop is currently listed far too low by  Google’s search algorithm, below two of my posts about  the Whistle Stop Coffee Shop Talent Oregon.    Hopefully this post plus some changes to titles in an earlier blog post (which had Title “Whistle Stop Coffee Shop Talent Oregon”,  plus some linkage action will fix this problem, but we’ll see.     The Whistle Stop’s website is using a Godaddy hosting template now and Google may be downranking for that or fretting over the Godaddy banner at the top which may diminish the content score (I’m just speculating here).

Blog content continues to factor very importantly into search rankings, especially (I speculate) because of the freshness and as a source of relevant links in to other content.      Confounding all SEO analyses is the fact that Google appears to treat things somewhat inconsistently to reduce the effects of really aggressive optimization tactics.    For example there are tricks that can be used that may lead to a short term big boost in rankings, only to leave a site penalized for months or even years for “manipulation of the algorithm”, which in the eyes of Google is a crime worthy of the harshest punishment.

One of the interesting challenges in search engine optimization is, as the excellent Mr. Matt Cutts at Google likes to say, that  “Googlebot is stupid”   that might be paraphrasing but I think it’s a direct quote. He was talking about the fact that good site structure will “help” Google figure out the natural and relevant relationships between links, content, and websites.     Matt likes to point out – sometimes to some fairly hostile SEO folks at conferences – that good SEO is mostly just applying a lot of common sense “best practices” rules for websites, aka “building for the user not the search engines”.      I often give that good advice to people who ask me how to rank well even though they are usually disappointed (and skeptical) when I don’t give them hints from the bag of  secret tricks they think you learn at search conferences.     For the record it used to be a lot easier to manipulate ranks and it was a common practice, but now most quality SEO folks will advise you to avoid deception or manipulations and spend your time and money seeking legitimate incoming links and building great websites.    That does NOT always work – especially for new sites – but it’s good general advice.

So let’s see if Google can get this one right quickly.   The most relevant site for the query “Whistle Stop Coffee Shop Talent Oregon” is …