Pagerank of your host ~

(~ Tilde) ranks higher ?

[4crests]

Has anyone noticed instances where Google may be ranking sites by their hosts link popularity ?

I have noticed several instances where a website has a very low pagerank, poor content, very few links, etc. etc. but it still shows up in the top of the listings.

In many of the cases the page url is like this:
[anyhost.com...]

If the url is followed by a (TILDE ~), such as in ~anyuser , does google rank the site by the popularity of www.anyhost.com ?

There is something there, i just can't put a finger on it. Or, maybe it's just coincidence.

[physics]

Often universities use the ~ for different users. I believe that Google ranks university pages higher in general.

[Beachboy]

Now there's an idea! Suppose I have a truck repair website. What is involved in getting a domain such as:

universityoftruckrepair.edu

?

[4crests]

There are lots of providers that give their users a ~anyname as their personal web page. Two of my providers do it.

[Giacomo]

Now there's an idea! Suppose I have a truck repair website. What is involved in getting a domain such as:
universityoftruckrepair.edu ?

Corrupting somebody at IANA [iana.org]. ;)

From [iana.org...] :
The .edu domain [iana.org] is reserved for degree-granting educational institutions of higher education that are accredited by one of the six U.S. regional accrediting agencies and is registered only through Educause [educause.edu].

[4crests]

I am not curious about .edu domains. Would like to hear about URL's with the TILDE(~).

Such as www.anyhost.com/~anyuser

[physics]

Well, I can see you're pretty serious about this. I know of no advantage of the ~ Anyone else?

[thinker]

2 out of my 8 owned domains is hosted by another of mine.

For various reasons, I have subdomained two of my domain names. The subdomain contains a ~

for example

www.mysite.com/~mysiteontopic

Mysite is my domain as well as mysiteontopic.

It can be reached by putting in either the above url using the ~ (til) or by typing in the www.mysitetopic.com address.

[conor]

>> It can be reached by putting in either the above url using the ~ (til) or by typing in the www.mysitetopic.com address. <<

Watch out for dupe content and re-directs !!! SE's esp. Google are not going to like it !

[TallTroll]

Isn't the ~ part of windows directory naming protocol, rather than a concious decision? Check the hosting of the sites displaying ~, I bet they are on IIS or Win2k servers

Then again, I could be wrong, can anyone offer evidence one way or the other?

[SmallTime]

~ tilde often used for user accounts on unix systems. I've always assumed it a disadvantage in terms of ranking.

[Ove]

I think we should remember 99% of a regular user dont know how to make a tilde i have to try a few times everytime i should make one

/Ove

[andrey_sea]

But it sure does help with ranking! There is a site which has not been updated for a year, has ugliest possible design, which includes a background graphic randerring page text almost unreadable. It only has one instance of keyword in its title and nowhere else in the code or on the page and it still ranks as #1 for the last year. I used to be #2 to for that keyword, but now am burried under a number of very heavily optimized sites for that keyword. Still that ugly site with "~" in its URL sits as #1 as if it has been nailed there. The only thing I can think for it to be ranked so high is "~" or some huge seniority points.

[wardbekker]

If I tell a person from my country to press 'tilde' on his/her keyboard, most of the time they write it in full.

Newbies for president ;-)

[Deadlock]

not wanting to teach anyone's grandmother how to suck eggs or anything but...

the ~ denotes a quick and dirty method of setting up a web accessable folder for a user on a *nix machine. My old university allows students and staff to set up their own folders of this type, as do other uni's, which i think is why the majority of university related pages that come up in a search have a ~ in them.

Now I hope (hope-hope-hope)that google, in their spirit of boosting academic sites edu,org,etc, are not using it to denote university affiliation because... well basically because it doesn't, for example several servers here have ~username development folders and we most definitly are not an academic/info-centric institution.

although if the ~ is the google holy-grail, then perhaps we should keep it to ourselves, adjust our urls and clean up in the refferal stakes :)