photopassjapan - 11:59 am on Oct 14, 2006 (gmt 0)

I guess whitenight, sandpetra and Car_Guy is right on spot with this.
The "just for the love of it" site we have been making became authority i guess... for whatever we do it won't fall under number 5 for any of its related searches. And if we tweak it a little every half a year, it usually becomes #1.

But you know... the focus was definately not on "ranking in google", that's for sure. We were making a site about a certain industry allright, but from an underground, indie, amateur, "designer" view... meaning we never cared for anything else, than what we put up for articles and pictures for ( great point on the digital camera! ), and that those who we wanted to read it, really do read it. But for example we did a lot of interviews with the greats of that specific area. Even though nobody read them at that time, these articles are now all over the SERPs... sometimes bypassing their own sites ;)

Most of its success came from offline, word-of-mouth publicity.
It's local, it's right on spot, and unique.

After two years we were toying around with searches to see how on earth can we grab this much attention for such a unique / local aspect of an otherwise large industry.

And we were like... top 3 for everything. Globally.
Not that it brought us any money ( we wish ), but we still are.

There are factors i think that made this a relative sucess... which are...

It's unique... it's independent... it's obvioulsy hand-made ( HTML all over ), has a consistant design and layout that has been the same from the start, often deeplinked from elsewhere because of subjects/aspects/pictures many people care about but no one saw merit in posting them on the net ( except us, for we were very very obsessed with it )... a lot of offline networking... and i mean a lot... some things we were involved with were even on national TV ;)

And it was our staff that got paid for that work even with this small piece of "advertising" involved, not vica versa.

And if a site that has been around, cared for and about for years... gets noticed through many, many referrals online... it will more likely than not become a favourite of the SEs as well in my opinion.

And gets away with everything :P.

( i know this is not the thread to mention this but that site had two identical versions on two different domains for two years now. You know, a mirror site... but server migration was delayed, later even canceled, so in the end they were on the same server, on the same IP as well. And it never saw a penalty. )