This recommendation by Amazon, that just arrived in my email inbox, is either one of those smug moments when you kid yourself into thinking “ha, see, even the big guys get it wrong” or Amazon knowing more about me than I realise…

“Dear Amazon.com Customer,

We’ve noticed that customers who have purchased Head First HTML with CSS & XHTML (Head First) by Elisabeth Freeman also purchased books by Patricia Thayer. For this reason, you might like to know that Patricia Thayer’s Coming Home To The Cowboy (Silhouette Romance) will be released soon.”

I like the “people who purchased X also purchased Y” feature when it works but this is a not the best example of it in action.

Similarly, if you’ve ever bought anything from iTunes, you may have noticed a “Just for you” section appears with tunes you may be interested in based on your past purchases. All is well until you buy a tune by “The Veronicas” for your daughters (honest!) and from then on you’re doomed. Just for you: “Hilary Duff”, Just for you: “The Pussycat Dolls”, Just for you: “High School Musical”, etc., until you Just switch it off. What they need is the “I like/don’t like it” feature that Pandora has.

Anyway, I have a cowboy waiting for me, The Veronicas playing in my head and an excited anticipation of the kind of traffic the keywords in this article will pull in!

Further to my Google, PageRank, search results placing post and yet again for the sake of posterity and curiosity I have to record a further oddity in our search engine rankings.

We are currently second place for “ingredients australia” in Yahoo! Search, Australia and NZ and since the addition of this relatively minimal amount of text…

Web Design and Development

Projects we are and have been working on include; underwater.com.au, Byron Bay Dive Centre, Whale Watching Byron Bay, Marine and Coastal Community Network, Marine Passions, PacMab, Melaleuca House, Byron Bay Accom (In conjunction with Nextwave Media).

While there is not much here at the moment you’re welcome to take a look at Sandra’s or Nick’s notes.

Contact Ingredients Australia, PO Box 1437, Byron Bay, NSW 2481, Australia | contact@ingredients.com.au

…we have moved up to 3rd place in Google for the same search.

Once again it is not especially significant that we get the rankings for what may be an obscure search term (Although we have already had hits from searches like “ingredients in australia”). It is however an indication that the idea of aiming for some kind of niche has validity at least for search engine placement. If you try and search for “web design and development australia” I doubt we’d appear after thirty pages of results.

Almost as soon as we connected up the wiring for ingredients.com.au we began receiving mistaken emails from food and general ingredients suppliers. All that was based simply on our using the keyword “ingredients”.

Anyway, for now I’m just keeping an eye on the changes and clearing up the inevitable junk email being sent to our newly popular contact@ email address!

Right now our home page has a Google PageRank of 4/10 and we are on the first page of search results for the words “ingredients australia”. To give some perspective on that, we are currently only 7 places below Vic Cherikoff’s website and his site has a PageRank of 5/10. Vic Cherikoff’s site is one that definitely does have a great deal of valuable content relating to “ingredients australia” and has been around for a long time.

In of itself that would not be very surprising, until you consider that we have almost nothing on the front page. In fact, the page Google has currently indexed simply says “Sorry, there is nothing here yet but you can contact us at….”. Not only does it have very little content on it but it has no links out of it (except for our email) nor does Google have any links to it indexed. We have also made very little mention of our site.

How much real value this has depends on whether we are specifically aiming to attract Google traffic based on the keywords “ingredients australia”. Nevertheless it is interesting to see just how skewed search engine results can get.

(Note having said all that, these results may just disappear as soon as I publish this!)