Forum Moderators: Robert Charlton & goodroi
I have written quite a bit of original content and have noticed something that is interesting.
Why is it that original quality content will rank well in one senario, and not so well in another. Example...
If I make a quality content page about blue widgets and place it on my site www.widgetexamples.com it does not rank well in the serps.
If I place the same quality content page on a new domain it goes to number one.
This seems to indicate to me that google judges your domain, not your pages. This may not be big exciting news to anyone, but it surprises me because I have found Google to be very good at page specific content. (judging a page by it's content not it's domain).
As a website owner trying to make a quality webpage it places me in a scenario where I can decide to take my quality content and instead of including in my www.widgetsexamples.com website (a website I am building for the future as a quality site) I can take the same content and put it on a new domain www.newwidgetsite.com and have it rank well.
The thing is I want my my original site to do well. I want a quality site. I want my site to judged by the quality of it's content not the "color" of it's domain name.
To paraphrase this all. I have a very clean informative site about a service that exists in many cities.
If I take a page from my site about one city from my website and put it on a new domain it ranks very well (top ten results in every experiment for places like Manhattan, Washington DC, and Waikiki) but it isn't even listed in the top several hundred listings on my main site.
But the bottom line question for discussion is this.
Can good content overcome whatever "filters" google has applied to your site?
I hope so (and believe so, but after waiting so long one begins to wonder)
[edited by: tedster at 5:42 am (utc) on Nov. 5, 2006]
Most of what Google does in ranking a URL is done by algorithm -- it's automated. The predominant jugement about the quality of any content is made based on how OTHER sites value that content, whether they link to it, how prominently they link to it, and so on.
The domain name alone is but a very minor factor, but there are so many other domain related factors. Every domain is quite a unique study.
Important factors that might affect the rank of a URL within a domain include the history of the site, the linking patterns within the domain, the inbound links to the domain, the general page template that may be in use, the quality of titles and meta descriptions, the URL structure used to name pages, and so on. Just the fact that the same article is on two domains does not mean the playing field is otherwise leveled for ranking, or that the domain name is in any way the deciding factor.
Every varible you mention, let us say they all indicate your domain isn't very good.
Can good content over come?
Is content still king?
Or are the other varibles such as link stucture, templates, etc. more important?
