instinct - 10:19 pm on Nov 24, 2005 (gmt 0)

Just for fun I'm going to share an old crackpot theory I had about WW's search.

The thought was that the poor functionality of WW's site search was intentional and that encouraging users to use Google's 'site:' search had the side effect of increasing WW's rankings.

I theorized that Brett and co. knew some superstar SEO secret that the more 'site:' specific searches G sees for a particular domain, the higher it might rank it.

To me (I'm not an SEO pro) it would be logical to conclude that seeing tens of thousands of 'site:' queries per day for a particular domain would be an excellent indicator of a site's popularity/authority.

Now I wonder if all those searches had perhaps a negative effect: increasing the frequency and depth of indexing by the bots. It would seem to me that Google's (and Yahoo's?) algo might do this based on the same logic "hey, this site is really popular, we better index it like crazy to maintain accurate and thorough results".

Obviously, this wasn't WW's intention but I'd be interested to hear what people think. Could the number of 'site:' searches seen by the SE's possibly affect ranking or indexing frequency/depth?