Last week I looked at who the top 10 SA sites with the most authority are, and investigated why Google favours them more than others.

Well, I decided that there is more to it than just the number of backlinks and pages indexed. So I did what we do best at Quirk, and played cricket...I mean did a little more digging.

But first, I need to explain some of the inconsistencies with the results from the tool in our previous report.  Why did we get some negative values in the results for IOL and SA Gov sites? This was what it looked like:

So what’s up with the inconsistent results?
Well, if you look at www.gov.za; when we do an index search on Google, you’ll make use of the “site:gov.za” command – then it comes up with the usual 221,000 pages indexed on Google.
So when you do use the correct command to check for supplemental results (site:gov.za *** -view), then Google gives out bogus information like 997,000 pages.
So for the final act, I checked site:gov.za –view ; that showed 1,110,000 results. A big difference don’t you think? Unfortunately Google blocked me, so I could not supply the same results for IOL, but figures don’t add up.



But gov.za is also a top level national domain. Does Google perhaps treat TLND's differently? Could the figures have changed so drastically in a week? Or should the real question be, how much do we trust the results supplied be Google…