Ranking Guyana, South America in Google

This article was first published on the 10th of May, 2020 by Patrick Carpen.

Ranking a website in the Google Search Engine isn’t easy. On many occasions, I’m tempted to think that the Yahoo! search engine delivers more accurate and relevant results than Google.

Nevertheless, for some reason, the Google Search Engine has dominated internet searches with more than 90% of searches done on Google. How that happened is a bit of a mystery to me. We’ll talk more about whether Google is really better than Yahoo! and how efficient the Google Search engine really is in another article. For now, let’s suffice to say that “search online” has become synonymous with “google it.”

Coming back to the topic, I entrusted myself with the task of ranking my website, “guyanasouthamerica.gy” for the keyword “guyana” on Google. Needless to say, that is no ordinary job. Many people build a website, such as, for example, “languagefun.org” and are surprised that, after months and even years, their website shows up nowhere in google for the search term “language fun.” It leads to question the relevance of Google search results and its under-the-hood algorithms.

Can we do it? Yes we can! But it is no ordinary task. As I mentioned in a previous article, “A Landmark Achievement in my SEO efforts,” it took almost 1 year to rank “patrickcarpen.com” for the keyword phrase “patrick carpen.” Now bear in mind that the keyword phrase “patrick carpen” is nowhere near as competitive as “guyana.” There are very few monthly search results for “patrick carpen,” and very few (if any) competing websites.

Guyana, on the other hand, is a keyword that is searched perhaps millions of times each month, and there are hundreds of sites competing for the ranking.

So let’s run a search and see what comes up in Google for “guyana.” Needless to say, my novel but very relevant website “guyanasouthamerica.gy” is showing up nowhere in the google search engine at all for the keyword “guyana.”

Here’s what’s showing up.

1. Wikipedia – Yes, the almighty Wikipedia which dominates the search engine for perhaps millions of keywords due to its sheer size and number of pages alone.
2. Britannica.com – Well personally, I think this is well deserved.
3. CIA.gov – Whoa! The CIA.gov website ranks number 3 in Google for “guyana.” First of all, this website has little to with Guyana. Second, it doesn’t have the keyword “guyana” anywhere in the domain name and I could go on and on. Let’s suffice to say that Google search results are becoming more and more questionable as to their relevance.
4. bbc.om. Seriously! The British Broadcasting Corporation ranks number 4 in Google for “guyana“?
5. commonwealth.org. Once again, I see the keyword “guyana” nowhere in this domain name but here we are google!
6. nationalonline.org. Whew!
7. theconversation.com. OK. Let’s have a conversation about Guyana?
8. WHO – the world health orgnization. OK.
9. Guyanatourism.com. OK, finally some relevance. And kudos to the search engine experts behind this site.
10. Stabroek News. OK. This is indeed a news site about Guyana.

If I look further down, I will see the UK government, lonely planet, NY times and even a “kimberlyprocess.com”! None of these websites are 1/1000th as relevant to Guyana as “guyanasouthamerica.gy” yet google chooses to put them on top and refuses to rank me.

Well, they say time is a factor. Guyanasouthamerica.gy is still relatively new, and I’ll refuse to engage in any “black hat” techniques. What I’ll do is keep adding pages to my site with relevant keywords and interlink them. I’m pretty sure there will come a time when Google will have “no choice” than to push my website right up to the top 5 of its search results for “guyana.” And if it doesn’t? Then something is definitely wrong with Google.