I've just discovered the strikepoint radio show on webmasterradio.fm and have been listening to loads of them. They claimed in one episode that BigDaddy gives 85% importance to a trusted domain and 14% to links and then 1% to on-page content. Do people agree with this?? I am seeing signs of it being true in my area of mobile phones where sites about mayonnaise are ranking for terms with just the keyword on the page, no related backlinks. Presumably because the domain is trusted. And I'm seeing people somehow getting a page up on a .edu domain and that ranking high with no backlinks. So how are people taking advantage of this, buying up sites with trusted domains where the owners don't know the true value?
I haven't heard anything about this, but 85% is EXTREMELY high. This sounds like a lot of talk from somebody on the radio that gets paid to talk.
The gist of that statement sounds correct to me. In other words, trustrank is the most important ranking factor and on-page content barely matters. However, what doesn't make sense about the actual statement is that trust has a lot to do with old links. So links are involved in that 85% and that 14%. I'd say that the age of the links and the age of the site matters a huge amount, the number of anchor text links matters a lot but slightly less, and on-page content matters only a little. Obviously the actual percentages that the radio host gave are a complete ballpark guess. Nobody has access to any real information like that and if they did, you can be sure they wouldn't announce it on the radio.
Isn't being a trusted domain the same as getting incoming links anyway? How do you get to be a trusted domain? On-topic links from authority (trusted) sites within your niche and perhaps an ageing factor, though this has yet to be proven. Some people have argued you can escape the sandbox by getting lots of authority links quikly. I have yet to see this though. Can you point me to an example of this? I wouldn't make sense to me, if it was ranking for no other factors than being a trusted domain then surely it would be ranking for every keyword term in existance?
I just noticed it's only high in the serps in Ireland. Page 2. http://www.google.ie/search?q=free+ringtones&hl=en&lr=&start=10&sa=N world-of-mayo.com It's ranked about 95 in google.com But it's still a bit odd, he just stuck this page, http://www.world-of-mayo.com/free-ringtones.html, linked it from the homepage and it started ranking. The radio show is hosted by www.davidnaylor.co.uk
It's not as if that page is unrelated. The guy that own's the domain has oviously just added a landing apge to the site and linked it from as many pages as possible using 'free ringtones' anchor text. It's hosted in Ireland so it's also getting a boost in the local SERPS.
A link: search on Yahoo shows that only one page links to the free-ringtones page externally. It's basically just a link from the world-of-mayo.com homepage. 'free ringtones' is a pretty competitive keyword and it's unusual for a page to rank high like that.
Absolutely... Dave gave an example there too... if you got them... The only thing you want is trust of search engines and you can rank for any term...