Follow-up on same siders experiment

I wanted to follow-up on my prior post regarding the Same Siders Experiment.  The purpose of that post was to try and generate more traffic to my original Same Siders post in an attempt to get Google to rank that original post higher in search results for same siders. 

Wow, I was prepared to report the results I found over the weekend, but as I'm typing this right now on Tuesday, the results have changed again.   About 2 weeks after the experiment post, I noticed an unexpected outcome.  The Same Siders Experiment post had taken the spot of my original post as the 8th one in the Google search results for same siders.  The original post was now one below at the 9th spot.  That was an unexpected outcome and I was surprised that the new post had shown up in the rankings so quickly and overtook my original post. 

As of Tuesday of this week, the experiment post is still at number 8 on the main page, but the original post is now on the second page of the search results, down to number 12 in the list.  Well, that wasn't the intention now was it?  Very odd...Right after my experiment post, the traffic to my original post quickly went to the top of the list in my statcounter account in the popular pages link, as I would have expected.  But the fact that my original post never moved higher in the rankings and has now trailed off in the Google rankings perplexes me. 

Obviously it varies on a weekly and daily basis, but just when I thought I had a decent idea on how to get your rankings higher, other than purchasing Google Ad Words or a paid service, that idea was squashed.  I'll continue to keep and eye on that over time and if anything crazy happens, I'll report back.

I do find it interesting still that my Happy Anniversary post is most popular almost every time when I go in to check my popular pages in statcounter.  My Big Brother 13 premiere post is now a close second, but I still find that very strange, since our Anniversary was in May.  Ah, I just figured out why.  I checked the 'Came from' link in statcounter and the top referring link was from Bing images when people search for 'small happy anniversary pictures'.  They would scroll through the little images on Bing and would click on the image I used, which takes them to my blog post.  Which is funny, because I did the same thing, except on Google images when I found the picture that I used for that page.  Apparently people like the image I picked, just like I did.  That makes more sense now.  Very interesting how people can stumble upon your blog in all sorts of ways you wouldn't have expected!

Here is a good link on suggestions for getting your ranking higher...