I' ve put auto in Google and I got this list: 1. http://Auto.de PR 6 2. http://Auto.cz PR 6 3. http://www.autobild.de/ PR 7 4. http://www.cars.com/go/index.jsp PR 8 5. http://www.spiegel.de/auto/ PR 5 6. http://www.autosite.com/ PR 7 7. http://www.automix.pl/ PR 6 8. http://www.de.map24.com/ PR 6 9. http://www.edmunds.com/ PR 8 10. http://www.autoscout24.de/ PR 7 So nothing what I've believed about SEO is true: Domain, the title and PR are obviously not the first things important to get listed high in Google. And especially not a .com domain...
Those results are localized. G doesn't return the same information to all users all over the world. I get a completely different list. G decided that you are in Germany or at least Europe, and prioritized returning sites relevant to your location. I'm in the Philippines and I don't get any of the German sites when I search for "auto" at Google.
Google is getting smarter all the time. Google is now intelligent enough to know that you can easily go to Germany or the Czech republic from Slovenia to buy a (used) car, because it's not so far. Wow!
I don't claim to be a guru by any means but my observations would be something like... Its a combination of domain, size of site and title tag. Its a single word match for the domain plus the title tag is also pretty effective. That top site doesn't have a huge amount of backlinks but they may well be higher quality and relevance than the other sites which seem to have alot more. Its also a fairly large site with 30,000 odd pages. The domain itself has probably been around a long time aswell so this adds extra staying power if it has been at #1 for sometime. Not quite sure what you mean by .com not being good for ranking. This is simply a regional issue. The link you gave is google.si the Slovenia regional Google search so its giving less weight to US hosted .com domains but that German domain at the top is coming up as more relevant from a regional point of view I'd say. If you do the same "auto" search on Google.com you will see different results. From what I understand, a .com domain hosted in Slovenia would show up in the .si listings fine if it was language relevant and optimised properly. PR has only ever been an indicator and cant really be used as a rule of where it will appear in SERPS. (i.e. you cant say PR7 will always rank above a PR6) Doesn't work that way since it depends on so many other factors... Joe
So you believed the wrong things all the time. It's more than well known that link anchor text is pretty much solely responsible for your ranking in Google.
Usefull answers all above! So, if I want to win a contest, which says: *** Post about 'our site' on your site. At that and that date we will search in Google for 'abcxyz' keyword. The one whose site will appear highest in Google, will win a prize. *** So what to try? - Find a site with highest PR possible, long time online...? - Know where the contest starter will search in Google from... - Put in "link anchor text" - short explanation anyone? - which has to contain what?...OK, 'abcxyz' in the title, link to that site and...what else? Does repeating 'abcxyz' or required link helps? - ... Any other suggestions? Few such contests are around. Prizes are $xxx or $xxxx. I must say that I understand if I write "abcxyz" here in this post and then go in Google and search for 'abcxyz', that link to my post will be probably the first listed. I've tried more than once...But since many will put that exact required word in, other tricks will be needed.