At this very second, a recent story on our TV news site is ranked #3 on Google for hurricane katrina gas shortage.
We're not well-linked by other websites, and most of our traffic comes from in-house hits to the website, but Google loves us for some reason. (And I think we love you back, Google.)
My explanation for our search engine success is that our HTML is very cleanly written, instead of being cluttered with ads and other cruft like (most) commercial news sites.
Now the trick is to find a way to profit from our high rankings.
Actually, not at all. Those would benefit the sites we link to, but I doubt it'd do much for our own site.
You've seen what it looks like if you view the source code on a regular news site. They have incredibly cluttered markup for their table-based layouts, lots and lots of code for all of their ads, lots more javascript, etc., so by comparison, our code is almost entirely the actual news content -- making it easier for Google to tell what the real content of the page is because it's less diluted by other junk.
Katie, do you think it could be my insistance on using the rel attribute and the use of meaningful links and meaningful titles for our links? A rather vague explanation of how Google's search works Our search: Google Technology.