Hello everyone, I have a site that I am trying to get to rank high in Google for a certain keyword. I took a look at the top 10 results for that keyword, and I'm not sure why I can't beat some of them. First of all, most of these sites are not all that detailed. Most of them are a single page with some basic info. I have heard that "content is king" so I made a multipage website with a lot of information. I have also been trying to get backlinks. I post in forums, I write articles, I comment on relevant blogs, I submit to directories. As of writing this post, my site has about 150 relevant backlinks, and a keyword density of about 3% for my chosen phrase. NOW...a look at the top sites. There are a couple of them that have a PR of 1-3, and thousands of backlinks. However, they are fairly basic in design and aren't that detailed. But they have a lot of "power" I guess from the PR and backlinks. BUT, there are some other sites in the top 10 that I don't have a clue why they rank so high. There is one site that is just a single webpage with one or two short paragraphs, not very helpful content, PR 0, and only about 10 backlinks. Why can't my site outrank this? Also, there is another site with NO content at all. The site has a low PR and lots of backlinks....but the site doesn't work. You click on the link and it goes to a blank page. Why does that rank so high? I have been working hard on getting backlinks and adding content to my site, but it doesn't seem to be improving in rank at all. Any ideas?
You answered your own question. They have a lot of links. The entire "content is kind" philosophy is based around the idea that people are going to so love your site they will go out on their own sites and link to it. Needless to say, this does not happen very often in MANY niches(some just aren't that interesting or don't have a real passionate community), so "content is king" fails. "Content is king" has no basis in the algorithm whatsoever. It's the idea that people link to good content. So if you have links, but shit content...you still rank.
I know that some of the sites rank high because they have a ton of backlinks, but some of the other sites have hardly any backlinks...it is those ones that I'm not sure why they rank so high.
Older domains can rank more easily. The domain name exactly matching the query can help. They can have powerful backlinks They can hide their backlinks. There's too many ways for this to occur to really determine much.
If fresh content is king, I'm not sure why my site doesn't outrank some of these other ones. Some of the top results don't seem to have been changed much lately...no new content, no new backlinks, etc. Perhaps if I keep concentrating on adding new content and adding backlinks I will be able to outrank them eventually.
Google changes its Algorithm every now and then. It is difficult to fix our mind on one set of rules. Experimentation is the key. Change your strategy whenever you find that what you are doing no longer works.
Well without you actually stating the keyword to us here it is impossible to tell you why without inspecting all these sites you talk about. High quality links are still the king. That said a big footprint on the web (many pages) also outperforms a small footprint on the web (few pages), then there's index age of a particular site compared to another, the inclusion of relevant search keywords in the domain name and so on. You should look into your visitors/members creating content for you (think of the biggest sites on the web - mostly user generated content) as well as link baiting with tools, widgets and other link-worthy trinkets. Always think set-it-and-forget-it instead of the normal perpetual-work model. Cheers and good luck...
You have to remember that google will kick the sites that don't have good content or aren't working out of the top ten soon. They just haven't noticed them yet.