It's really not an important point, but the page I was referring to
is:
Travel Blogs - Travellerspoint
Travel Blogs by Travellerspoint members. Start your own free, highly
customizable travel blog or read up on what other Travellerspoint
bloggers are writing ...
www.travellerspoint.com/blogs.cfm - 31k - 1 hour ago - Cached -
Similar pages - Note this
This latest contribution on that page is dated 22 August.
Another thought (read: "idle speculation" :-) ):
Re-reading your comments, many refer to the site as a whole - its
"collective" value arising from various factors such as the number of
pages, the range and depth of content, the freshness with new
contributions all the time - all good points.
But I am not sure which specific PAGE should score extremely highly
for any given search term.
Also I notice that if you google for site:travellerspoint.com the
first item in the SERPs in your Home page BUT WITH https: prefix. If
anyone clicks on that link, goes to the page and then clicks on other
links they mostly (all that I checked) link to the other pages using
https: prefix.
Do you know why your Homepage is indexed with the https: secure
prefix? Have you noticed any other (non-secure) pages with the https
prefix? Have you considered using 301 to force http: instead?
I had a quick look at several other sites that perform high when
googling for [travel blogs] (travelblog.org, travelpod.com, and
lonelyplanet.com). Am I right in thinking that your site makes
extensive use of subdomains and the other sites do not? When I look
down a list of blogs for Mexico (just an example) I see that most of
the links take the visitor away from the current (www) subddomain and
to various different subdomains whereas the other sites seem to be
using structured hierarchy of folders. (That was my impression; I may
be wrong/over-simplying/being irrelavant!!!)
It is also noticeable that the server response on your site is very
slow compared with the others. THis may be due to a period
particularly heavy demand for your pages, but it would be worth
checking from different request points. (There is a site that has a
free tool for checking server response time from several different
timezones but I cannot remember its URL.)
Robbo