Scraper sites and domain info sites outranking my EMD

[goodroi]

Some of you might remember that I launched the goodroipow experiment back in October 2012 to demonstrate that links impact rankings much more than keywords in url. You can search for goodroipow to see the results.

Then in 2013, I updated the experiment to add an exact match domain. This helped show that EMDs are no longer given big ranking boosts because it never ranked high.

I just checked back on the experiment and noticed some scraper sites and domain info sites are ranking above my EMD. To be fair my EMD has about no SEO work done to it. This just reinforces my opinion that EMD are nice if you can get the EMD for free but probably not worth paying a high premium for it.

ps I have also had some success manipulating the rankings when playing around with freshness of content and click throughs which has made me re-double my efforts to improve user engagement on my real sites.

[Dymero]

Can you elaborate on what you mean by "click throughs?"

[goodroi]

Not sure what the specific trigger is but when a bunch of people visit a page it rises in the ranking.

[bluntforce]

I mentioned in a different thread about how I like to "buy" traffic for new sites using something similar to Adwords, just to get that effect.

If I search for goodroipow:
#1 badcrazytest with 5 backlinks
#2 elmerlitella with 0 backlinks
#15 goodroipow with 0 backlinks

There is probably some benefit to being wordpress subdomains and having the keyword in the page titles.
Have you considered pointing some keyword links to one of the elmerlitella pages that link to goodroipow.com?

[Dymero]

goodroi: It's interesting that you say this, as I've (observationally, nothing quantified) noticed that some of the rankings on my site seem to go up and down with the amount of visits the site gets in general.

For example, during Q2, a quiet period for our niche, rankings seem to go down once fewer people come to the site overall. Then they go back up once people start coming back.

I'd like to see if there is anything to this.

[aakk9999]

It would be interesting what would happen if you optimised the site. Lets say, talk about this experiment on that one page you have and also optimise the page title.

I am not talking about spammy SEO. I am thinking on developing the quality one page domain with goodroipow subject and see what happens.

Mind you, the test would probably be faulted now when everybody will link to your domain or you get domain citations whilst this test is being discussed.

For the record, here is the original thread which initiated this experiment:

Does Keyword in URL Count More than Backlinks Now?
Oct 15, 2012
http://www.webmasterworld.com/google/4508168.htm [webmasterworld.com]

[bumpski]

The thread below implies keywords in URL's are important, but can also be overdone. Certainly scraper sites overloaded their URL's with keywords, and similar ones at that.
[webmasterworld.com...]
And it also could explain why many well organized, small domains, using good software engineering practices; have been hammered.