incredible how strong cohost is in SEO pulls. any given post can become google's default answer to something if you're specific enough. this is great power
I couldn't resist the urge to test this myself. My understanding is that Google tailors search results based on your identity and past query history, so I tried these on a Safari private page on my iPhone, with WiFi turned off.
Results were as follows:
- query: “early summer ozu queer subtext”. Success: This returned my cohost posting “Ozu’s Early Summer seems pretty darn queer to me, part 1” as the first and featured result.
- queries: “ozu queer subtext” and “early summer queer subtext”. Failure: My cohost post was not included in the first few pages of the results, while several other results were included that were not related to either Ozu or the film.
- query: “distribution of Patreon earnings”. Failure: My cohost post on this was not included in the first few pages of the results.
- query: “log-normal distribution of patreon earnings”. Partial success: My Rpubs.com article “Distribution of Earnings Among Patreon Projects Charging by the Month” was the first result returned, another of my Rpubs.com articles on Patreon was the second result, while my cohost post “The number of patrons per Patreon project is log-normally distributed” was the third result.
- query: “power law distribution of Patreon earnings”. Failure: My cohost post on this was not included in the first few pages of the results, many of which were not related to Patreon.
So my conclusion is that I’m not sure that cohost is given an heightened attention by Google. It’s just that if you do a very specific query then you’re likely to see a cohost post that happens to be about that very specific topic, if it exists.
I should also add that results are very sensitive to your location and other factors; for example, I was not able to replicate my successful results on a Safari private page on my (WiFi-connected) laptop.
But why not go wild anyway? Post about stuff that the world doesn’t yet know it wants to know, like how many times Kirk and Spock had sex, and link to it too!
