How does a web address get to be the first result of a search engine?

SEO, Search engine optimization here’s the WIKI

Google does not give out their algorithm, but it is amount of times something is searched for. Search Engine optimization of the site and it was links. i am not sure they are still using links though.

There are a lot of factors but from what I understand some of those factors are keywords hidden within the site, the frequency which people visit the site and a huge part is how many other websites point to that site (thus verifying that it is a good resource)

@abysmalbeauty :: The keywords things stopped working a long time ago.

Look at what Google changing their algorithm did to Fluther in February. For some reason Fluther was pretty hard hit. My point is they change things pretty fast. There is a entire industry based on getting your page higher in the results and usually that involves doing scummy stuff. Your best bet is to actually produce good content.

And there are things people can do to hurt your pagerank.

@johnpowell what exactly happened in February? Did fluther.com get fewer visitors or the visitors counted differently?—and that function…block this address from search results—I first saw it when I got a mega-sleezoid parking/hustling domain come up on a search and found it useful. But fluther?

One of the early algorithms that gave google a big edge was to count up links to a site from other sites, and weight the importance of the link from the other sites based on their ranks.
As far as I know they do still use this kind of score but the inputs from other algorithms are blended with link rankings these days.

Keywords can still help if your keywords are not the sort of thing that gets swamped by folks plopping every possible interesting popular topic in their keywords in order to get hits on anything. Be specific and they can help a lot.

@anartist :: Google counted Fluther as a content farm. Some info is here. I’m still not sure how Google put Fluther into this category. But I understand why they tried to block content farms. In my opinion Fluther was collateral damage.

edit :: If you copy and paste from wikipedia or other sites you are part of the reason this happend.

@johnpowell Poor fluther odd mixup —When I got that notice during a search the site WAS a content farm