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For my main keyphrase, there is one website that is constantly number one. I have analysed the site and there is nothing strange going on, everything seems above board. Month in month out for the past year or more, this site has been number one in a highly competitive SERPS (over 2 million results). Dominic did not faze this site.
I checked the backlinks and there are 27 in all. Nine from external sites. Six of the nine are from directories. Two from ODP, two from Google directory and two from the yahoo directory. The remaining three links are from sites with pr 4 and 5. The index page of this site has a pr 5. How is it possible that this site remains number one so constantly? My site has 23 external links which show up as backlinks with an average pr 5. My site is optimised and everything is above board. Yet, my site yo-yos from page three to top five and, in this update, back to page three again.
I have one ODP listing and One Google listing but no yahoo listings. Is it possible that the Yahoo listing has more weight than I realise?
The old gray mare aint what she used to be. (eg: pagerank aint the end-all-be-all).
Better results through quality optimization.
Do you have your important page headings in H1 and H2's?
What about keyword density. It all helps. Plus, maybe the site you are referring too is much older than yours. That does count too.
Sure it wouldn't hurt to get a Yahoo listing.
Good luck.
I have two competitors who are #1 and #2, both are good clean sites, no complaints. I am happy at #3 but have wondered what makes them stay up there even though. We all three have two yahoo links each.
site 1 - 36 backlinks from PR4 and 5 websites
PR 5 Main Page - PR4 internal pages
14 pages in the index
site 2 - 24 backlinks from PR 4-6 websites
PR6 Main Page - PR 4-5 internal pages
16 pages in the index
My Site - 277 Backlinks from PR4-8
PR7 Main Page - PR6 internal Pages
124 Pages Indexed
I have compared KW desity, titles, meta description, image alt tags, anchor text, bullet texst, Headline tags and everything else I could think of. I optimized to be the same or barley above them in on-page optimization. None of us are breaking any rules or really even pushing anything to limits.
I know that they have had their sites up for more than 3 years, my site is almost one year old. I have been in the #3 spot for about 7 months. I'm not complaining about them being above me but it does make me wonder what I'm missing or if it's their age that keeps them there.
The more I analyse this whole new ago, especially in the wake of Dominic, the more I think that age makes a real difference, ie- the older the site, the better the rankings.
Now if you think about it, it does makes sense. If a site has been around for 3 or 4 years, and is continually updated with good quality content, I think it is fair that it would rank a notch or two above sites that have been there a year or less.
Now just think that in 3 years, maybe you will be number one and newer sites will be number 3 and 4... :-)
Just for an added note, my site was really badly effected by Dominic and has been boucing between #3 and the duplicate index problem. I'm pretty sure that everything will work itself out.
Looking at my field, I can say that the above statement commented for seopractioner does not seems to be the case.
To some extend I wish he was right thought
Joe
That would have been a real silly move from Yahoo as I dont doubt many of us still pays or renew the Yahoo submition ONLY because of the value of a Yahoo link (at least these of us who have sites ranking hight scare of loosing these positions)
Yahoo submition per se, simply do not worth the price any longer since you dont show by searches and I am afraid that if this link value stop so we'll stop paying Yahoo. IMHO of course
Come on now...Yahoo optimizing their site and worrying about PR? Dude, they have 800,000 backlinks and PR10+. I assure you that at the marketing meetings/board meetings, when discussing strategy, Google seo is not an issue :)
Brett would you care to expand on this?
Well, take a look for yourself. There have been subtle changes. Instead of "Yahoo! Travel - Boston Hotels" as one would expect, they have "Boston Hotels - Yahoo! Travel". In my opinion that is optimization for Google. I think it makes very good sense for them to optimize their website. Think of all the extra taffic they can get. As for their PR10, it is now showing as a PR9 in my toolbar after the last update.
Ever consider the toolbar is out there recording your site traffic?
Brett, do you think this might be going on? Any evidence? Or are you kidding?
Wow would that open up a can of worms. If they could really measure # of visitors it would be one thing but just measuring tool bar results would be quite different. It would just show what a computer savy minority visits.
A new site comes up, they give it a good ranking but of the large toolbar data they find 1) few visitors to that site 2) few repeat visitors to that site.
So, even if their algo likes it, the public don't.... bye bye site.
