True, there are times when keyword gurus go wrong. In my view it is OK for everyone to go wrong once in a while. Here is the story. I received an old and tested advice today from a guru that goes like KWs should have decent and consistent search volumes in Google Competition and backlink competition must be reasonable to come anywhere near success. He also told me to stay away from "weight loss" as the top 10 websites have 100s of thousands of backlinks built over years and it is difficult to beat them in their backyard. Fine. This was what I believed all these years but since it came from a guru, I became a bit curious to put to test his warning and see. At position #8 is www.weightloss.com/ in Google USA. No doubt a wonderful feat against a competition of 115,000,000 for "weight loss" without quotes. Not your problem if you are thinking that this site may be having 1000s of backlinks. We are groomed to think in their mold. In addition, it is the competition and the rat race for this coveted KW that has led you to think so. Look at its backlink stats: Yahoo: 1497 AltaVista: 638 Alltheweb: 612 I don't know about you but I wouldn't have achieved this by any means. I have 7-8 times more backlinks to my site for the very same anchor text (weight loss) in all those three search engines and still not in the first page of Google in any country. Ok so be it. I have more surprises for you for I am contradicting the gurus. Here are some more statistics: Keyword in title tag: NO Keyword in meta tags: NO (in fact there are no meta tags used) Keywords in alt tags: NO; Very few alt tags found on the site Keywords in <H> tags: There are no <H> tags at all Keywords in body tag: NO Keywords Density: NIL But Alexa, an industry reputed ranking giant gives it 420,717 Quantcast gives a high 95,683 It beats my comprehension. I know it is an aged domain , booked about 7 years ago but what the hell? It has little onsite and offsite SEO value. The only thing that crosses my mind is that because it is owned by ROCHE it has a high rank, this is what you and I lack exactly and continue to fight amongst ourselves by writing articles and more articles and loafing around in the link exchange section here. Thank you SEO Gurus for keeping us in dark as to how this could happen without your knowledge. If you knew, please let us know.
Actually you have no idea which links Google scores. All of the links counting tools and link analysis tools use "guessing" as to what Google sees. Being as none of the tools are developed by Google most if not all are therefore basically useless. Also the keyword in the domain helps with the rankings. There are so many other factors involved in SEO rankings that the post is pretty much off base.
1. Google lists out all the links it has crawled but within your Google webmaster tools account. This is the true count. 2. Above answer should do for this as well. 3. Not useless but at least helpful if not totally useful. Otherwise how will you count your competition's links? 4. Of course yes. No doubt, but I have raised only the surprising points
Great post, alevoor. It's no surprise that there isn't a discernible formula. If there were, then nobody would be hanging out a shingle as a SEO consultant, because all such experts would be making money hand over fist from their own websites: why would they need to do anything else?
If its a 7 year old domain, then it should rank higher. Why? Its been targetting that keyword for 7 years and those backlinks are just samples..
Actually it is the links Google sees and which it decides to reveal. Google would never show everything as to do so would leave it exposed to reverse engineering. Also those are links it sees.....not scores...there is a difference. Again nothing but what it sees is revealed. If you do SEO the right way you never need worry about a competitors links, as you would be able to find the needed links irregardless of what others do.... I did not see anything surprising ...
Without major "mistakes" within your site (internal linking and code errors) and a domain name which is an exact match for your search term, #1 is almost guarantied. With a bit of decent on-page optimization they could be #1 within no time.
This is what is surprising thing is. The website in question is not SEOd. Without onsite and offsite optimization the site has managed to rank so highly >> Yes, Google lists only those links it thinks is okay for it to do so and it has been always lesser than Yahoo's count.
You might need to learn a bit more about SEO 1 Nobody looks to Altavista or AllTheWeb for links counts or value. 2. It was registered in 1998 so it is grandfathered. 3. It has 14 DMOZ listings 4. It is on what appears to be a dedicated server. 5. Hosted in the US so should be ranked in Google.com 6. Keyword is in domain. There is much more to SEO than what you have pointed out. For all anyone knows you may have tripped filters while trying to build links. If the site in question is your the .org in your sig file, then you are using the wrong TLD since by US IRS standards you are not a non-profit or an organization. And if you used that freetraffic building site that is probably an issue as well. An old proverb goes.... Judge not the splinter in another's eye... till you have removed the tree from your eye.....
lol so true.....I live in the woods and in spring and summer you can't see the houses due to the trees you can see the bare trees in my avatar...
as for the rankings on this site, I think you called it, that big fat DMOZ PR6 with "weightloss resource" as anchor text, and this one in the google directory http://www.google.com.et/Top/Health/Weight_Loss/ supply the trust, and as nearly every single link they have has "weightloss" in it, (in url) its pretty simple really, they just have really good links.
Yep good links like that DMOZ and their main site tossing a PR 7 http://www.roche.com/index.htm . Also grandfathered more than likely with the 1990s domain by Google. Huge trust factor most will never attain. All of those links were probably from natural methods from highly relevant sites as well as opposed to the silly articles & directory links most get. While the title tag is not correct SEO wise it does contain the words weightloss... However they are not at the top so getting above them is possible I think.
Age of links matter as well. If it's links are years old and your more recent, theirs will be more valuable.
I believe there is no clear cut right or wrong answers in seo techniques. One of my sites is ranked (by G) among the top 20 sites for the highly competitive keywords of "cheap ebooks" and "digital products". Among the top 10 for "cheap computer software". It has PR2 and non-thematic incoming links of about 250. There are about 1000 internal text links for the keyword of "cheap ebooks" and "cheap computer software" (not using "home" for links to the homepage). Based on the above, it should not be ranked among the top 20. I'm puzzled and happy at the same time since I'm getting a lot of organic traffic.
The keywords you noted are not competitive to be honest.... so what you are experiencing is completely different than what others are trying to accomplish The true indication of competitive keywords is when the quotes are added. Results 1 - 10 of about 51,000 for "cheap ebooks" Results 1 - 10 of about 288,000 for "cheap computer software" Competitive keywords are above 1,000,000 with quotes..... Also your site has some virus which forces browsers shut when visiting the site in Firefox....
What makes you think they don't have a good offsite SEO? You have 7-8 times more backlinks, so what? If you've listened to those SEO gurus more carefully you would know why that site is ranking better than yours. Cause it's pretty obvious when you compare their backlinks against yours.
The number of results is a poor indication of competitiveness, regardless if you use quotes or not. You are really only competing with the top 10 - 20 at most. Just because lots of people talk about a certain topic, it doesn't mean it is competitive. Lots of people talk about widgets in seo examples, but it is probably not a competitive niche. Alevoor, it sounds like you need to learn more about seo. You are basing rankings on only certain factors when there are really about 200 different ranking factors. Quality of links is much more important than quantity of links. Also if you get thousands of links with 'weight loss' as the anchor text, you would likely get penalized for backlink overoptimization unless you get thousands of links with different anchor text too.
I think that's right. Being completely preoccupied with my site alone was probably not letting me open my eyes to other critical factors such as the ones you and SEM-Advance wrote about. Nevertheless, it is true that more than anything else, the dedicated servers and authority matter most and authority doesn't just mean good articles as I can see in the case of ROCHE website. Thanks, all of you. Alevoor