Why would amazon's page be first in the serps?

[rfung]

I type in Master and commander dvd, and amazon's page on the product comes up first. They have no pagerank, no backlinks, yet they are first?

[PCInk]

Backlinks and PR do not define where you are in Googles search engine. Think about it - if PR was everything, then Yahoo categories would be top for almost any search.

It probably has no PR as it is a dynamic page which is creating a session ID for you, or maybe Google hasn't got round to updating the toolbar fed data yet.

And to say that Amazon has no backlinks is ridiculous. They probably have more backlinks than anyone (except for MSN, Google, Yahoo...). You don't need backlinks to a specific page to get PR, to the root of the domain is fine - PR increases on your home page and then that increase filters down on the internal links, thus increasing the whole site's PR.

If you needed backlinks on specific pages, Amazon would be doomed - they just have too many.

Google probably can determine an estimated PR from the domain name, checks the relevancy of the page (more important than PR) and displays the results accordingly.

[karmov]

It's very common to have a page that has been freshly crawled with no page rank perform well. Without this ability Google would only be able to show new pages 3-6 weeks after they've been crawled (average time between PR updates). They've got some internal mechanism that allows them to do this. I assume that it's pretty similar to their standard algo.

[edit_g]

I type in Master and commander dvd, and amazon's page on the product comes up first. They have no pagerank, no backlinks, yet they are first?

Well, you could turn this on it's head and say that Google is a great search engine because it serves you up exactly what you asked for.

[trillianjedi]

The major stop word for google on that search I would think is "DVD".

Amazon will be a recognised authority for that (anchor text backlinks).

The "Master and Commander" bit is just pulled from on-page factors, but neither of those words will have an authoritative site (unlikely anyway). Google ignores the "and", so what google is showing you is an authority on "DVD" and a page from that authority with the words "Master" and "Commander" on the page, preferably in the title.

As Edit_G says, exactly what you wanted.

TJ

[filo]

This has everything to do with affilates linking to amazon. Lots of amazon's products have been, in a sense, google bombed. This has helped put amazon to the top of a lot of searches.

[PatrickDeese]

I would say that the search:

allinanchor:"master and commander dvd"

in google pretty much explains why.

[Teknorat]

Oh man that movie was bad.

[jweighell]

Yeah, was it me, or did hardly anything happen in the story? They chased after another boat and, um, that was about it!

[Yidaki]

>Master and commander dvd, and amazon's page on the product comes up first.

Hey, that's a quality result, imho.