The sum of relevancy
Top of serp = lots of backlinks and high PR right?
Nothing is more annoying than widespread misinformation. There is nothing wrong with being wrong as long as an opinion is stated as opinion or theory but when so many spout the words “expert” and “I’ve been in this for years” along side their unresearched paraphrasing and ego’s, I get a bit peeved. I suppose at this point I should dish out my regular reminder about me and this website..
Everything in here is experimental and based on ideas that I have had or found somewhere else. I am not an expert, I am documenting as I learn and most of what I write is based on either opinion, gut feelings based on results of SEO experiments or proof based on the results of SEO experiments. If you speed read this site then please don’t leave comments saying I am giving out misinformation unless I clearly state something as a fact and you can prove otherwise with evidence, which by the way I would welcome, I and hopefully ant readers I get will all benefit from it. That’s why we’re here!.
And on that note.. here is something with proof. PR and backlinks are not the most important element to get you listing high in the SERP’s. I’m not going to give you any of the keywords I used for this because five minutes is all it takes to find plenty yourself. Here are the results of the top websites returned for just one very competitive key phrase typed into Google.
Key:
- PR = PageRank
- GI = Google indexed
- GL = Google links
- YL = Yahoo links
- LD = Yahoo linkdomain
- Age = Domain age /year
Pos 1: PR= 2 __ GI = 59 __ GL = 23 __ YL = 1250 __ LD = 1460 __ Age = 2005
Pos 5: PR= 4 __ GI = 1190 __ GL = 590 __ YL = 4450 __ LD = 4640 __ Age = 2002
Pos 13: PR= 5 __ GI = 4,690,000 __ GL = 3 __ YL = 282 __ LD = 1,340,000 __ Age = 1999
Pos 20: PR= 6 __ GI = 4660 __ GL = 13,000 __ YL = 262,000 __ LD = 369,000 __ Age = 2005
All of these sites are very much on the same topic and all have the key-phrase in their title tags. None of them have the keywords in their domain name and all links point to the home page except for the one in position 13 which is a review site. This one is the only one that the site is not based on the niche of the key-phrase I used but does have plenty of pages on the subject. I thought this makes a good contrast to list among the others above.
For the site in position one, the backlinks listed in Google are… 3 internal to the domain, 8 are all from one high ranking forum but linked from low ranked pages within the forum, one from a well known article site and the rest are a mixture of non ranked pages, forum entries and a couple of low ranked directories. All in all, nothing that could cause you even the slightest headache if you had to go on a backlink war with this website.
The differences between position 1 and position 5 is are the two that interest me the most. I will be spending some time studying these two websites to see if I can spot anything out of the ordinary. Why?..
Pos1 is a very relevant website but if compared it to pos5, first impressions say pos 5 is much more relevant, much more content, in fact all round more than what pos 1 has going for it. There are some extremely valuable clues to be had here but as of yet I can only find one possible reason, which I’m not confident about at the moment. The other thing to note, and this is very surprising.. Pos1 is a uk site and pos 5 a .com. The result above are taken from a google.com search. The google.co.uk search shows pos1 holing firm but the site above in pos 5 now lists at pos 73!. Hmm?
I’ll report on this when I figure anything out.
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