Ummm, I typed

         model railroad magainze

into Google and MRH was the 4th listed.

Then I typed

        "model railroad magazine"

into Google and MRH was the 3rd item listed.

Can you explain what's happening with your searches?

Charlie

I typed in MRH and google listed it 5th.  That doesn't seem difficult.

And of course, if you type ...

free model railroading magazine

Into Google we're at the top of the list. That's because we're it ...

Charlie, I wish I had a good answer to your question ! My searches performed several months ago were not returning MRH in the top 20. It's apparent I should have tried it again before assuming the results were the same... at least I can dismiss that idea and move on to another! ;)

Happy to say that Craigslist in the Washington D.C. area is permitting the listing of the magazine under "free" to remain...

Steve

And of course, if you type ...

free model railroading magazine

Into Google we're at the top of the list. That's because we're it ...

When I searched, MRH was first AND 2nd.

You can add keywords to any site by using the <meta name="keywords" content="whatever"> in the head of any HTML document, but trying to trick search engines by just loading bogus keywords onto the page is a such an incredibly abused approach that I think most search engines completely ignore the keywords meta tags.

I believe most crawlers like google just scan the actual page content, and maybe a description but not the keywords.

Also, many search engines and listings rank site higher the more other sites actually link and refer to it. So if you make your own page that just says "Model Railroad Hobbyist" 1000 times, first of all, no one else in their right mind would ever link to it, so a web crawler would never find it, but it would still rank the actual magazine site first.

"MRH" was my first try and Model RR Hobbyist was 4th in the Goggle list.

Free Model Trains was my second try and we made 3rd on Goggle.

 Free Model Trains Magazine was my 3rd attempt WE came in top of the Goggle list.

Model train Magazines Free 4th try again were on top of Goggles list.

Free model Magazine  search # 5 put us in 3rd place.

Free Model Railroading Magazine back to the top with the 6th Goggle try.

Model Railroad Magazine Index  worst so far as we were on page 3 the 4th down from the top on Goggle.

Model Railroading Magazines Free the hit parade number 1 and 2 of 1,480,000 listings on Goggle.

I tried at least 6 others and can't remember what they were but we were in the top 2 listing on all of those and we are on the top of every listing that included the words Free with Model  Railroading or Railroad including the word Magazine with each no matter which order the words were in and compaired with the rest of the Free Modeling magazines we are Number 1 and in model railroading we were also number 1 around 75% of the time. I would say in the Goggle search engine we are by far the #1 Model Railroad Magazine.

Dan

And remember, part of the way Google's algorithm works, it keeps track of, not just what is searched on, but what is then clicked on.  So, if you want to give MRH a slight boost in Google rank, click on it when you've searched for it.  No more details:  suffice to say Google's algorithm is non-linear, complex, but quite elegant.

When I search "Sudbury Division" on google our club always comes up first.  When I type "WRMRC" I sometimes get the club (Waterloo Region Model Railway Club) first, other times the Worcester Regional Medical Reserve Corps gets top spot.  It seems when club members post on MRH we beat them out, and when we don't for a while, the gang from Worcester takes over again... 

 When you do a google search, there is a promote button next to each entry.  It looks like a box with an up arrow inside.  I just hit that button to promote MRH to the top of the search.  I am assuming that if enough people do a search and promote MRH up, it will show up as the first rank in every search.