This is an update on my first ever post about search engine page ranking. As of today, I'm back up to #10 for speaking activities on Google and #9 on Yahoo. I'm talking about my ESL speaking activities page.

What did I do? Well I added "speaking activities" o the page a few times, but I don't think that's what changed things because the cached version is still the old version (without the added "speaking activities").

I think the difference is that I read somewhere (maybe search engine watch) that search engines partially base their rankings on whether visitors to a site return to the search engine. If they don't return, they found what they wanted and the page must be good; its ranking goes up. If they do return, they didn't find anything good; the page is bad, the ranking goes down.

Anyway, I clicked on my site from #14 and never returned to the search engine every day for about a week. I can't be sure that's what helped (and I only did that from Google, not from Yahoo). I mean maybe the competition lost some page rank or something, but there's certainly a chance it helped. Time for more experimenting...