A curious result on Google

Hi,

I don't do SEO.  Most of the sites I'm involved with are the sort of amateur/geek affairs where if you posted the site on the bottom of a rock on the far side of Pluto the users would still find it.  Also, from my glancing acquaintance, SEO all looks like a bit of a black art.  

A few weeks ago, I got cornered/cheerfully volunteered (my version/their version) to update an old website for the local Friends of the park group.  The website was an old campaign site that hadn't had any content updated since the campaign triumphed four or five years ago, but it had some hosting and a domain name (www.thewalks.co.uk).  I guess it would have come up round about page 1 million in a google search for 'the walks'.

Because we'd been talking about it here I thought I'd write it in HTML5 (why not? makes a change..).   Once it was up I was REALLY surprised to notice that a google search for 'the walks' gets 21 million results with thewalks.co.uk at the top.

As far as I know I haven't done anything content-wise  that could account for this.  Could it be that Google has the hots for HTML5?  I can think of one or two reasons why this could be so, and it also chimes with something a linux uber-geek told me, years ago, that his sites always rated well on Google because it liked cutting edge/standards-compliant sites (xhtml 1.1 strict, in his case, natch!).

Anyway, there it is.  I thought I'd put it on here for what it's worth.  Could be a fluke, could be a key.

Dave Cooper