Forum Moderators: open
A site that:
1) Opens with a pop-over Flash animation
2) Home page is total 100% graphics... not one single word of text
3) No inbound links showing in Google or any other SE (FAST etc)
Google has it as a top 5 for a 370,000 result search.
I wonder if having the search term in the title has any bearing...... nah. Too obvious :)
Have you looked at the google.page.cache?
Onya
Woz
Google's cache of the site shows exactly what I'm seeing so there is no bait and switch involved. (It's not that type of operation... its a high profile global brand name)
14 outgoing links from the site, zero links coming in to the site.
The spider simulator at SearchEngine World confirms nil text.
Its a puzzlement.
(Added) Just thought to look at the PR and it shows a 4. Now I'm even more puzzled. How do you get a PR 4 from zero links and no content on the home page.
Also, zero links coming in actually means zero links above a certain PR threshold. Have you checked to incominglinks on other engines? AllTheWeb often gives a larger link list.
Onya
Woz
So am I to assume that Google now neeeds no page content at all and that links, no matter how topical or lacking in PR, will determine what the viewer gets offered? So for any new sites, I don't actually need to write anything anymore, I just need to get links.
By the way... the site has nothing to do with me, nor is it a competitor and all the usual vested self interest arguments count for zip....
I'm just simply trying to understand what the hell is going on and is the "content is king" concept now such a poor relation compared to links that we are now seeing results like these?
All of the sites had decent keyword density, content, etc. But each search always had one or two randoms in the mix with few backlinks and minor text. They just looked really out of place in the comparisons.
Does the amount of time your site has been around play a factor?
Its not an old site so I don't think there is any grandfather factors at work.
what are the other page 1 serps like,
how competitive of an area is it for SEO.
this can play a significant fact in certain industries.
contrary to popular belief there are still 100s of industries where the real dirty tricks have NOT even started.
Shak
Google has it as a top 5 for a 370,000 result search.I wonder if having the search term in the title has any bearing...... nah. Too obvious
Of course, having the search term in the title is very important.
But this kind of thing is very much dependent on the specifics of your query. Especially for multiple word phrases, that there are 370,000 results doesn't mean that anywhere close to that number are optimized for the term, or even that the term appears in the searched-for order on a majority of them.
For example, if you search for "big city blue widget sales" you might get 370,000 hits. But maybe only 10 of those have that phrase in the exact order -- the others having some variant like "blue widget sales in the big city," or even "blue widgets" together in one sentence, "big city" in another, and "sales" scattered on the page; whatever. Now, if there are two sites with your exact search term as the page title, I'd expect both of them to rank quite high for that search, regardless of other content factors.
The point is that 370,000 results for a given query do not necessarily make it a competitive query.
The page did have backlinks with keywords in the text. And something I *think* I saw there and other instances is that besides keyword link text, links *might* also carry more weight if the page they are on has the keywords in the title.
Anybody else notice this? Or am I looking at things crookedly?
Jim
the whole "theming" comes into question, yet again.
I am no SEO, but I think jimbeetle's post makes sense, about page title of where the link is coming from, I will even go as far as saying domain.com/keyword.html would be a factor.
Shak
JayC....
If titles alone can influence results to that degree then that is just opening up the doors to spam heaven and further neutering of on-page content.
The 370,000 is simply an indicator that I am not rabbiting on about some really obscure seach which returns 20 results or some such figure.
Re exact phrase matching... remember that the page has no phrases to work with.
Dazz...
The links point to the index page, not internal pages. I see a few more links than I first thought... maybe 5 or 6 but all under Googles radar.
Jimbeetle/Shakil...
I see no connection beween the names of linking sites or text links to the search term used. To illustrate with a hypothetical example:
The search term is "north surry lodging"
The links are coming from links pages where the text entry reads "The Dog And Pheasant Hotel"
I'm not trying to be clever by using the exact words from JayC's example, just trying to say that I believe the number of records Google returns is indeed relevant to competition.
just trying to say that I believe the number of records Google returns is indeed relevant to competition.
Generally, sure. But my point was that when you're looking at results for multiple-word phrases, often a good number of the results returned do not contain the phrases in the order you've searched for. In those cases, the ones that do contain the exact phrase tend to be at the top, and that's been especially true of late if they have that phrase as the beginning of the page title.
The number of pages returned alone isn't a reliable indicator of the competitiveness of a search term -- it isn't a measure of the number of pages that have been well-optimized for the term.
Since we don't know the term or the site in question, these are only general observations made in an attempt to brainstorm an answer to austtr's situation. Without knowing those facts, neither I nor anyone else is likely to be able to give him a full and confident answer; we can only give him ideas that he can use to examine his site's situation.
But as to the statement, "remember that the page has no phrases to work with," it certainly does: the page title itself. If it were the case that no other page contained the exact phrase, I wouldn't be at all surprised to see this page as number one... and why not, if no other page contains the phrase?
It's likely to be the case that a page with relevant text, and optimized for that search term (including the page title but also other on-page placements of the term) would be able to outrank this one; as long as there were no other big factors in its disfavor -- like a major difference in PageRank, for example. But we don't know whether there are any such pages.
Just to pick up on one particular comment:
> the ones that do contain the exact phrase tend to be at the top, and that's been especially true of late if they have that phrase as the beginning of the page title. <
I see a lot of sites that meet that criteria ... because surprise, surprise, they are actually about the search topic.... yet they are buried way down in the SERP's.
<rant> Why.... because no-one has fabricted a link framework to boost them. From what I see links beat on-page relevance and content hands down. It is the fundamental reason behind the explosion in the links industry that now dominates all the forums and has SEO's pouring countless hours into fabricated link swapping. </rant>
Might not be in this case. Still think it's something we should keep an eye out for in these "why does this page rank so high" situations. The more -- or less -- observations, the better.
>>the ones that do contain the exact phrase tend to be at the top...as there were no other big factors in its disfavor -- like a major difference in PageRank, for example
As JayC says so it must go. Google and other SEs first find the "best match." Then they apply whatever ranking alogrithms they use to further separate those that are close (simplified). In this case the apparently unoptimized page met the criteria enough to hit the top five.
It happens a lot, there's a post or so a week here on the same topic. I think each of these "weird" results should be very deeply investigated to give us all a better understanding of just how the Google criteria work. Especially for searches with comparatively few results -- the less noise the better.
