Paul, if your site has even a moderate amount of trust then it will rank for the main keywords of any post you make

That must be it then. My main site’s been established since 1999 and my main pages rank well.

In the case of the Worms Head Sunset there are only about 100 exact phrase matches in the world and yours is the top result.

It’s also top for the non exact phrase. It even ranks 42nd out of 704,000 results for just “Worms Head”. But I agree, it’s not the most common phrase in the world.

You say your pages only ranked for a short time, did you move them?

Not originally, my blog was online for 7 months. However I recently removed it, choosing to concentrate on my main website instead. For some reason my normal web pages are far more popular than my blog pages were, so I’ll be converting my blog content and integrating it with my main site instead. I mostly write articles rather than topical posts, so I think they’re more suited to a traditional website rather than a blog.

My site’s still in a mess at the moment though, I’m currently redesigning the whole thing from scratch. It’s going to look very different soon.

Do the urls still exist in the same format as before?

Not any more. The original blog pages may still be in Google’s cache, but most don’t exist at the moment. I’ve set up redirects for the few posts I’ve converted so far, but I don’t want to convert any more until I get my new design finished. The current pages have the same page titles and file names, but a different path. I haven’t added meta data yet either.

Thanks. Looks like a very useful site.

Paul

In the case of the Worms Head Sunset there are only about 100 exact phrase matches in the world and yours is the top result.

You say your pages only ranked for a short time, did you move them? Do the urls still exist in the same format as before?

Welcome to Blogstorm by the way :)

Nothing so far as I’m aware. As an experiment, I even went to extremes with incredibly mundane and not at all out of the ordinary titles such as “The Rock” and “The Tree”, although I don’t recall either of those doing particularly well. However, I did make a post called “The Old Oak Tree” which ranked quite highly for a short while, out of millions of results.

And what’s the big deal about “Worms Head Sunset”? Sorry to keep banging on about it, and it’s probably not the most common search phrase, but I’m still baffled as to why it’s still ranking so highly. It’s not like it’s the first time the sun had ever set at Worms head, it’s well known for doing that, so it’s definitely not a hot topic. What’s unusual about this one is that it disappeared from existence then returned to a high ranking.

Bottom line, it’s not just hot topics.

So how do you explain high Google rankings for non hot topics?

Paul