Advertiser spots impact of UK Fundraising listing on Google rankings
Howard Lake | 31 July 2005 | News
A company which has just taken out an annual listing in the UK Fundraising supplier directory has spotted that this has boosted his ranking for important keyword searches on Google.
Nick Guyton of school fundraising products supplier The Mug Man is keen to appear high in Google’s results pages for searches on the phrase “school fundraiser”. Before he took out the supplier directory listing on UK Fundraising his website was on page nine of the results. Within a week of his listing going live, his website was on page two of the results.
UK Fundraising has spotted this with other advertisers: in some cases UK Fundraising’s directory listing will rank higher than the supplier’s own website in Google searches.
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Why might this be, and what can your charity do about it? The dramatic effect on the Mug Man’s rankings is probably due to the high Google page ranking that UK Fundraising enjoys. This is Google’s complicated and largely secret method of analysing how relevant a website is to one or more keywords. UK Fundraising has a page rank of 5 out of 10. Sadly, we have dropped a rank over the past few months, but it seems so have quite a few sites in this sector that we monitor.
Google’s calculations include an assumption that a website linked to from a site with a high page ranking is also likely to be a good quality site in terms of the site’s keyword or keywords. So, in effect, a link or links from UK Fundraising will piggyback on the success of UK Fundraising’s page ranking, and probably it’s rankings in search results for the word “fundraising” or “fundraiser”.
While we don’t advertise this as a benefit of our site because it is beyond our control, we’re sure that quite a few of the advertisers on our site are well aware of the benefit this listing has on their search rankings.
About Howard Lake
Howard Lake is consultant editor of UK Fundraising. He founded the site in 1994 and successfully sold it in 2022. As director of Giving X Ltd he is exploring growing giving on a massive scale.
He is the founder of Fundraising Camp and co-founder of GoodJobs.