I can't figure out why this site is ranking so well for "Custom web Design" in Google.com: http://www.4guys.com/ The term appears in the title tag, but hardly ever in the body text and not in the anchor text of their inlinks. Their inlinks are high quality though. Any thoughts?
Hi Google gives a lot of weight to the title and description tags. Combining this with good links makes for good ranking.
Yeah that could also be the reason. I had a domain thats has been indexed for 5 years and got loads of traffic.
yea, not to mention the small line of text just below the image that is actually an h1. do yourselves a favour when analysing sites, look at them like the bot does first.. http://www.rankquest.com/tools/Lynx-View.php?url=http://www.4guys.com/ I'd say they know their stuff
One of the largest factors to why he is ranking well is domain age/site age : 12 years 7 months 19 days
that definitely doesnt hurt him but new sites can rank well straight away these days, domain age isn't such a big thing anymore
That is not true, it is very big thing, done my own tests and proved it to myself. If your in a non saturated niche it might be easy to rank well in some cases even if that niche is non saturated but highly competitive domain age is a large factor, try a niche with 100,000,000 results and see how easy it is to rank with a new domain (new domain being 1yr or under).
It's because they are leaving a footer link in all the sites they design for customers. And some of these footer links are on some pretty high PR pages...
lol, sorry but this is nonsense. our site is one year and 3 weeks old and inside the US top 20 (gl=us) for "SEO" now at 220 million results. http://www.google.com/search?gl=us&pws=0&q=seo&start=10&sa=N take my word for it
It has pretty much all been said, but yeah, the site has a 2.5k backlinks all with fair PR (some with high PR), high keyword density for web design, and they probably just have a leg up on 'custom', since Id wager its not that searched in combination with web design (what on earth would non-custom web design be?). I wouldn't say these guys were exceptional at marketing their site, but they do have a giant list of sites linking to them with the keyword 'web design', from at least as far back as 1998. Also, my understanding is that domain age has less of an effect than age of your backlink profile. The idea being that people who have long been linked to with the text "web design" are more likely to be what a searchee wants when they enter that term than some one who has made some clever linkbait that has gotten a ton of links, but will likely be forgotten about in a couple of weeks.
I thought anchor text was the big thing, though. Are you guys saying I could make sure the search terms I wanted were in title tags on my site, and then I had a bunch of quality backlinks that say whatever, and I could still rank well for those search terms?
yes, more and more so. too much similar anchor text works against you if anything these days, vary it and mix it up.
I think they're giving out a discount if they're allowed to place their link on the sites they create.
I noted active domains that have been indexed that are 1 yr and under, your site is over a year. Around 8 months Google will starts letting your site fully out of the supplemental index in most cases, and you can start to rank well 1yr and over most site are fully out. Google limits new sites to around 10 pages out of the supplemental index for around 6-8 months, then after that starts to filter them out. This also depends on the niche as I have had exceptions to this as well. I have taken active domains never dropped with indexed sites on them, with age 3+ yrs with links already pointing to them, that formerly had a site that dealt with entertainment, change the site to a health niche and it is already on the first page for a difficult niche in only 1 month, took my new domain/site 9 months to get there. It kinda pissed me off because there is about 1/4 of the content and it does not convert well with adsense, and its above my newer site that is totally optimized for that niche. I dont talk about anything I don't know first hand... By the way that is good ranking for that term, and most of your links are free.. thanks for some easy PR5's
I agree with SEOibiza. Each follow'ed link pointing to a site is a vote regardless of the anchor text. The anchor text is simply a bonus. In fact most *natural* backlink profiles are loaded with backlinks that use generic anchor text (click here, here, website, etc.). Linked images can also help and do count as backlinks. They are especially helpful if they use alt text. However, Google typically discounts standard size image links which are commonly used for advertisements (468x60, 100x100, etc).