i'd heard that tripod sites received extra rank on google due to its link structure - something about thousands of sites automatically linking to each other; or something. i didn't really think it was true until i had a look at the traffic stats for my Funny Shit page.

you see, a while back the page was getting 1gig+ of traffic per month; thereby hitting tripod's limit and going offline until the month ticked over. to get around this, i turned the page into a frameset and loaded the content off my dialup account's webspace. the vast majority of that site's traffic came from google; plus a few other searches. the tripod address has now dropped out of google's index... and you can see exactly when it happened. jan 15th. traffic to the site has gone from a steady flow of 50-100+ per day, to about 5-10 per day.

same content, different host; frameset in the same location as the old page (so no links were lost)... massive drop in google rank.

so now the question - put the content back on tripod? well no, i don't think i'll go that way since i did move the content off tripod for a reason. instead i've whacked appropriate meta-data into the frameset, which i forgot to do at the time. then i put in a copy of the old homepage as index.html, which contains links to all the old and eventually autoloads the frameset, humour.html (named a long time ago before i knew what i was doing). blatantly sneaky, if you know what i mean.

my theory is this: if google indexes index.html (and it should since i just submitted the URL to the directory and index.html should automatically load) then the hits should increase again. all the old files are actually still there on tripod, hidden behind the frameset; google just didn't have a link to them.

i don't know how long it is until the next google dance, but i'll be interested to see what happens to the site's traffic stats when it happens :)

of course the results won't be scientific. the act of blogging about the page creates a link from blogger; which has a similar effect to tripod. on top that, this will syndicate out to some livejournal friends lists; and i don't know where lj stands in google's estimation.

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