The Perfect Page - A Random Snapshot

How do they do so well with so little perfection

[bumpaw]

My Gold Standard has been pageoneresults classic [webmasterworld.com...] from Dec 24, 2003.

After doing a little work in trying to get a page to show up in the SERPS I drifted into observation mode. The key phrase I was playing with was "lavender soap" so after putting it through Google I got hung up looking at the top 10 in the results.

I went to the Page Source on all 10 and made a few notes on the things that interested me. There's no science here and all the things noticed don't exactly pertain to the Gold Standard.

Summary:
Not one out of the 10 use an h1 tag except for one black hat.

Only 2 use an h2 tag (one is the black hat).

One contains no title element.

Two contain no Meta description.

Four contain no DOCTYPE

All had varying degrees of errors or warnings in code.

Here are the details but I'm not sure that it's interesting to anyone but me:

A little study of results for a two word search in Google: "lavender soap" 05/06/2005

View Source with Firefox and it's HTML Validator by Tidy.

Overture Keyword Tools reports 20615 searches for March 2005

#1 Links to Product Page
No DOCTYPE
title = search term only
description - contains search term and more
h1 - none
h2 - exact search term
code - 58 warnings 0 errors

#2 Links to How To Page
DOCTYPE HTML 3.2
title - contains search term and more
description - contains search term and more
h1 - none - instead used <font size="4" face="Verdana,Arial, sans-serif"
color="#009933"><strong>search term and more</strong></font>
h2 - none
code - 210 warnings

#3 Links to Product Info
No DOCTYPE
title - none
description - does not contain either word of search term
h1 - none - uses instead <b><font face="Times New Roman" size="6"><i>
Secret</i><br><i>search term plus one word</i></font></b>
h2 - none
code - 5 warnings

#4 Links to Info Page
DOCTYPE - HTML 4.01 Trans
title - search term and more
description - search term and more
h1 - none - search term in styled <p>
h2 - none
code 3 errors and 76 warnings

#5 Links to 730 X 330 image With text hidden underneath
DOCTYPE HTML 4.01 tRANS
title - contains search term
description - contains one word of search term
h1 - plenty of them hidden with {display: none;}
h2 - plenty of them hidden with {display: none;}
code - 26 warnings
black hat - lots of relevant text, headings, and and links hidden under the image

#6 Links to same domain as #5

#7 Links to Amazon product page
DOCTYPE NONE
title - contains search term and more
description - contains search term and more
h1 - none
h2 - none
code - 11 errors and 381 warnings

#8 Links to image with 7 words of text
DOCTYPE HTML 4.01
title - contains search term plus one word
description - none
h1 - none
h2 - none
code - 2warnings
useless page with no links in or out!

#9 Links to shopping page with several products
DOCTYPE NONE
title - contains plural of one of the two search words
description - none
h1 - none
h2 - none
code - 12 errors and 225 warnings

#10 Links to product page
DOCTYPE HTML 4.01 Trans
title - contains search term and more
description - one search word out of the two
h1 - none
h2 - none
code - 9 warnings

[imstillatwork]

you should be able to blow them away, supposing you have the links too.

[Philosopher]

I don't think this post is about whether they can be beaten (they obviously can). It's a post of some research done on ranking techniques.

[bumpaw]

I've just being doing observations lately on what type of quality is actually showing in the source for the sites in the top 10. I'm not sure where it's going but it's sometimes surprising to me what's there. There is more than creme that comes to the top.

[plasma800]

I concur.. my industrymis currently dominated by a site that is the biggest mess I have ever seen. It drives me nuts, i can't even seem to rank at all for my search term.

To boot, I know he's doing some not so good SEO stuff...

[mole]

you haven't said anything about the *content* on the whole of the site. Maybe G thinks that's kinda important and cares less about the minutia of what's on the home page.