I hope it's not an intrusion (actually, I know it's an intrusion), but I noticed another comment made that SEO and SEM marketing types are one day bound to discover Centiare.com as a Wikipedia alternative for self-promotion.

I just wanted to cite a recent example of something I experimented with. Just a few weeks ago, I created a Centiare directory page about a behind-the-scenes producer of the video blog Rocketboom. Her name is Ellie Rountree. She doesn't have a ton of Internet exposure at this time, but there was substantial enough material about her (and generated by her on Flickr and MySpace) to build a short biography. This is her page on Centiare.

Now, remember, this page is only a few weeks old.

At this time, if we search for the words Ellie Rountree (not even in quotation marks), these are the results you get...

On Google (#2 out of 14,400)

On Yahoo! (#1 out of 1,720)

and, on MSN Search (#1 out of 8,650)

Centiare is only garnering a Google PageRank of 4/10, and we get maybe 150 unique visitors per day, so it is by no means capturing the hearts and minds of these search engines on the basis of popularity or any undue marketing efforts of my own. So, how do we explain the amazing results for this page about Ellie Rountree? My thought is that the search engines give high priority to MediaWiki software. Furthermore, I suspect that they give even higher priority to Semantic MediaWiki software and tags. From a privacy advocate's standpoint, this would be frightening. From the standpoint of being a stakeholder in Centiare, though, the prospect is exhilarating.

Anyone have any ideas that would explain this kind of search optimization? Granted, "Ellie Rountree" is not as competitive a search term as "low mortgage rates" or "asbestos lawyer", but clearly, there are enough memes about her on the Internet to make this a fair test case, right?

Greg