I am shocked and amazed! I joined less than 48 hours ago with the name 'Virginia Realtor' to test a theory regarding how powerful the forums links can be. The term Virginia Realtor is a HIGHLY competitive search term. Now, less than 48 hours later, I am #12 for Virginia Realtor in Google! I won't be bombarding these forums with all the tests I'd like to do. But I am going to start doing a lot more testing using my various sites and some other forums to try to deduce exactly what happened here. It is beyond my level of SEO competence to explain this incredible affect.
It would be nice to believe that this forum, or any forum, was that powerful, but I think what we have here is a coincidence.
Coincidence, eh? Search for Atlanta Realtor in Google then tell me if you still believe it is coincidence. Why do you think I chose a lame ass name like "Virginia Realtors"? - lol
I don't think it's entirely coincidence. There are lots of things that this forum ranks well for that it probably isn't the most relevant. And to be honest, I'm not entirely sure why, but I think it's at least partially because it's within the digitalpoint.com domain. Generally anything we put up within the domain, Google deems as "important" for whatever reason. Not that I'm complaining of course... Probably in the next couple days, this thread will rank well too.
I didn't understand your first post. When you said "I am #12 for Virginia Realtor" I thought you meant your web site. What you really mean is Digital Point is #12 for Virginia Realtor. That's an entirely different thing. I agree it's quick but this site is crawl almost perpetually.
I will tell you what is bad, that there are realtors out there whose websites are getting outranked by a forum not related to real estate. There is a lot of money to be made just off that search phrase alone This forum has been a great place for information and discussion, I could not be happier that I 'stumbled' across it.
I was confused by your post too- Im unsure how much traffic you will get by people viewing a profile, but who knows?
I am not really thinking that I'll get a lot of traffic because people will click through from the google -> profile -> website. But - I find this EXTREMELY interesting in terms of some VERY powerful affect that forums and blogs have on the google algo. Unlocking the ingredients to this magic power coud be incredibly lucrative for any search phrase in any sector. The search terms "Virginia Realtor" and "Virginia Realtors" are both competitive and for my profile page to show as #12 within 48 hours is insane. Popular theories that this effect seems to invalidate: 1) Authority sites are based on theme. Last I checked the theme of forums.digitalpoint.com had nothing to do with realtors or virginia. 2) There is a penalty invoked if all backlinks for a page use the exact same phrase (the profile page is always linked to using "Virginia Realtors" exactly. 3) For competitive search terms, it is important to have backlinks from a variety of domains - all backlinks to the profile page are from this site. I am going to start working with some of my sites to emulate some of the attributes of a forum and see what happens.
If you look at the McDar thread http://forums.digitalpoint.com/showthread.php?t=256, you'll see that the experiment there has also substantiated your three conclusions above.
Thanks debunked! My primary search term on this site is <Northern Virginia Real Estate> and I'm at about #8 in google for that and around #6 in yahoo... moving up slowly but surely. I'm still reading the sleeping bags post ... wow, it is long but worth the read.
<quote by Nitin> I joined less than 48 hours ago with the name 'Virginia Realtor' to test a theory regarding how powerful the forums links can be. </quote> Hey Nitin, Are you really a Virginia Realtor or just playing with the term.... I checked out your Pimp Blog and did not see any reference to real estate.. However I am a Virginia Realtor, and would love to be #12 on the Google charts for Virginia Realtor.. I thinks that will be about 10 million competitors there.... along with the hundred million for the word "Realtor" period..
Tommy - to start, you should use your forum signature and create a link with anchor text. That will get you going!
I did that BigP, but have not posted since it went live... maybe it will show up on this post. Should it show on posts previous to the signature authorization?