Crappy Pages That Rank Highly - What is up with that?

[NikkiS]

Hi all,

I'm doing some keyword research this morning, and on page 1 of Google for that phrase I come across a link to a poorly written, badly spelled site (article about how to QUITE smoking) that hasn't been posted to for over a year.

An article featuring my key phrase (nothing to do with smoking btw) was back in their archives somewhere, and yet this site was number 3 on the page when I searched my phrase with quote marks around it.

I really am feeling totally confused right now. Any and all comments would be greatly appreciated.

thanks,

Nikki

[Michael Silvester]

Hi Nikki,

Several things could be doing this. But its more than
likely going to be one of these 2 things.

1. The age of the site
2. Backlinks to the site that are using those keywords.

Backlinks with the keyword in the anchor text work
better than any onpage SEO that you will do.

Take a look at the keyword "Click Here". A word that
practically every website on the planet has. Infact
1,220,000,000 pages have that word on it.

That is a Kazillion...

Adobe Reader is #1 for that and does not mention
the word "Click Here" on the page.

How interesting

Take Care,

Michael Silvester

[NikkiS]

Thanks Michael, that does make sense.

[ARVolund]

Not really anything to be confused about. It just means one thing.

When the employees at Google say that great content is the most important thing they are not being truthful (ie: they are lying through their collective teeth).

There is nothing wrong with good content but it is not going to get you ranked #1 in Google. Obviously Good content will sell better but it is not what gets you the eyeballs in the first place.


Richard

Originally Posted by NikkiS

Hi all,

I'm doing some keyword research this morning, and on page 1 of Google for that phrase I come across a link to a poorly written, badly spelled site (article about how to QUITE smoking) that hasn't been posted to for over a year.

An article featuring my key phrase (nothing to do with smoking btw) was back in their archives somewhere, and yet this site was number 3 on the page when I searched my phrase with quote marks around it.

I really am feeling totally confused right now. Any and all comments would be greatly appreciated.

thanks,

Nikki

[mike.leembruggen]

exactly... it's all about the backlinks... and driving traffic... content is not king.

content will bury you... lol

[Chris W. Sutton]

Allen Says did something like this once. He was testing something and he just threw up a template that wasn't all that great. In fact, it still had a lot of the "epsim lorem" type stuff still in the template on the sidebar. Despite that, it was still drawing traffic and converting.

I think this is a good lesson for those that think you have to have everything perfect before you get something up. Allen made sales even though his template wasn't that great. How much would he have made if he had never put it up?

I'm not advocating slipshod work but I am saying you need to get it out there and tweak it as needed.

[NikkiS]

Thanks Chris, after reading your post I realised that I have spent so much time tweaking and trying to make things *perfect* instead of getting out there and promoting my site.

[Chris W. Sutton]

Originally Posted by NikkiS

Thanks Chris, after reading your post I realised that I have spent so much time tweaking and trying to make things *perfect* instead of getting out there and promoting my site.

Not a problem Nikki because alot of people do the same thing.

A perfect web page STILL won't make any sales until you get it out where people will see it!

Take care!

[JordanFrancis]

As already mentioned, backlinks are more influential than the page itself.

So then, how does one get backlinks?

Most generate their own. They do it themselves, or pay someone else to do it.

However, there's another way. It's just not nearly as quick & easy. And that is by creating content that is actually worth linking to...which means high quality, valuable-giving content.

When you make content that is link-worthy, over time, you'll build your backlinks.

But as I said, it's not the fast route, and it requires more effort. It's not the popular path for sure.

[CDarklock]

Originally Posted by NikkiS

I come across a link to a poorly written, badly spelled site (article about how to QUITE smoking) that hasn't been posted to for over a year.

It must be quite a smoking how-to article.

<runs away>

[The-English-Webmistress]

Hey NikkiS, try Michelle McPhearson's '30 Second Backlinks' ebook. It offers a nice little spin on how to generate backlinks quickly and (relatively) easily.

Good luck!


Andrea, The English Webmistress

[NikkiS]

Originally Posted by The-English-Webmistress

Hey NikkiS, try Michelle McPhearson's '30 Second Backlinks' ebook. It offers a nice little spin on how to generate backlinks quickly and (relatively) easily.

Good luck!


Andrea, The English Webmistress

Thanks Andrea, I've been reading Michelle's stuff all day. Interesting and helpful.

[hally0301]

Hi Nikki

It looks largely like your question has already been answered. It is all about the links. If you wanted to see who and what was linking to the other site you could use Yahoo Site Explorer or any of the other myriad of backlink explorer tools that are out there.

There are obviously heaps of different sources of backlinks that you can use. I would suggest a mixture of any or all of the following - article submission, guest blogs, forum posting, blog comments, forum profile links. Then if you get really lucky some sites will pick up some of your articles and republish them and you get more links.

Creating great content and just waiting for someone to link to it is the slow road to internet success. In a perfect world I guess the people with the best content would win the greatest share of the business, but we know this is not necessarily true.

Remember that link building is not just all about SERP rankings. It can also bring targetted traffic directly to your site. Niche forums and blogs can be a great way to bring traffic to your site while you are waiting for the links to improve your SERP's

[vivifoster]

at the end of the day, even if they are at the top in google. we still find them trash. although, i'm very disappointed at google for this.

[Matt Maiden]

Google can't tell crap from award winning art. How could it? It's a piece of software.

Backlinks are important to Google because it's like their way of getting referrals.
Google (or any other search engine for that matter) can't tell you what is good and what isn't so they have to rely on sites they trust or respect to tell them. The backlinks.

Only human beings would have the ability to come close to determining "good" or "bad" content.

If I had no taste buds the only way that I could help you find a decent restaurant, would be for me to ask my friends.

This is why you see crap ranking ahead of yours.

Because Google is tasteless.

[Ofthemix]

I've often wondered about this. For as much as I hear the phrase "content is king" around here, it absolutely blows my mind every time I see a 1 - 3 page outdated info website with a bad template and barely readable articles hitting one of the top 3 spots in Google for a competitive keyword phrase.

[Matt Maiden]

Originally Posted by Ofthemix

For as much as I hear the phrase "content is king" around here...

How about "write quality content".

Why? Why put the time and energy into something that is not even recognized for it's "quality"?

Just meet the criteria and the standard of the site or program you are dealing with.

It's obvious that the new cliche' should be "Make it pass" (in my best Tim Gunn impersonation)

[CDarklock]

Originally Posted by Ofthemix

For as much as I hear the phrase "content is king" around here, it absolutely blows my mind every time I see a 1 - 3 page outdated info website with a bad template and barely readable articles hitting one of the top 3 spots in Google for a competitive keyword phrase.

Search engine rankings always start out as guesses.

Then they aggregate consumer behaviour stats to figure out how accurate the guess was.

Remember the "all your base are belong to us" meme? That was barely readable and developed a massive swarm of backlinks virtually overnight. It was also a bona fide internet phenomenon, and things just like it happen all the time.

One of my personal favourites was "You! Invaders! Get you the hot bullets of shotgun to die!" - shown here in all its Japlish glory.



Stupid crap like this reaches honest-to-God fame on the internet all the damn time. (Strange people like me are largely responsible for it.) And if you can make your site look enough like one of these idiotic memes, it will shoot right to the top of the search results.

And it will drop back off just as fast.

[theemperor]

Originally Posted by Michael Silvester

Hi Nikki,

Several things could be doing this. But its more than
likely going to be one of these 2 things.

1. The age of the site
2. Backlinks to the site that are using those keywords.

Backlinks with the keyword in the anchor text work
better than any onpage SEO that you will do.

Take a look at the keyword "Click Here". A word that
practically every website on the planet has. Infact
1,220,000,000 pages have that word on it.

That is a Kazillion...

Adobe Reader is #1 for that and does not mention
the word "Click Here" on the page.

How interesting

Take Care,

Michael Silvester

Might have something to do with the page rank 10!!!!!

I'm surprised it isn't at the top of every search

[SVLABS]

I know I'm chiming in a little late, but something I noticed is that everyone has suggested so far that it's all about the links.

Here's my thinking.
Niche = quit smoking
Competition = extreme

Possibility that chosen keyword is simply a crap phrase that is not easily monetized and has no competition on it = Extremely High.

See the quit smoking niche has been around forever. The chances that any worthwhile, profitable keywords and phrases have not already been discovered are slim to none. If you've found a phrase in that niche where the top 5 in the SERP doesn't result in at least 1 quality built review site, then I'd say keep looking for another keyword to target.

Sure it could be all about the links, but my gut is telling me otherwise.

[Ofthemix]

Originally Posted by Matt M

How about "write quality content".

Why? Why put the time and energy into something that is not even recognized for it's "quality"?

Just meet the criteria and the standard of the site or program you are dealing with.

It's obvious that the new cliche' should be "Make it pass" (in my best Tim Gunn impersonation)

Yeah, that's my issue. The content of these sites is far from quality. 99.9% of the time that I see these type of little crap sites, they're Adsense farms.

And shouldn't it be, "Make it work"? lol I'm a pretty big Project Runway fan.

[Ofthemix]

Originally Posted by CDarklock

I don't remember any of the other ones that you mentioned, but I do remember the owls. <3 owls.

Still, these things typically become popular because they're catchy . . . or in the case of the owls, friggin adorable.

All of the sites in question don't really fit that viral criteria. It's more like someone who doesn't speak very good English throwing together an article just for the sake of getting their site ranked. For example, I know nothing about sailboating. The article could be about sailboating, I would read it, and still know absolutely nothing about sailboating. Nothing catchy, nothing informative, just boring usless info that probably only 1 out of 1000 people that read it will get anything out of. I know this is the point of Adsense farms though. Feed the people crap so they'll want to click on your ads for something more informative.

But, as it's been mentioned before, these sites probably rank because of age and backlinks. Next time I find one, which will probably be the next time I do niche research, I'll run the URL through my backlink checker and see what comes up.

[Matt Maiden]

Originally Posted by Ofthemix

And shouldn't it be, "Make it work"? lol I'm a pretty big Project Runway fan.

LOL Tim already owns it.

"Make it pass" is the new catch phrase here because that's how we roll in the WF

[Kamran]

Originally Posted by The-English-Webmistress

Hey NikkiS, try Michelle McPhearson's '30 Second Backlinks' ebook. It offers a nice little spin on how to generate backlinks quickly and (relatively) easily.

Good luck!


Andrea, The English Webmistress

Thought it was 30 Minutes Backlinks not 30 Second Backlinks

[dburk]

Hi Nikki,

I don't believe I have ever heard Google say they rank search results based on "greatness" of content. Nope, never heard that from anyone at Google.

Instead they say they try to return useful content based primarily on relevance. They do suggest that creating great content is a good way to satisfy users, but they recognize that content some folks may view as crap can be both useful and relevant. Therefore their is no greatness, or crapiness filter in their algorithm.

If you want to outrank poorly written content you must score higher in relevance based on the signals of relevance that Google uses in their algorithm. There is no great mystery here, just score higher in relevance and you win.

[InternetMarketingIQ]

Beauty is in the eye of the beholder.

What is crappy to you is obviously beautiful to the Googlebot.

You can make big Adsense money with very plain looking sites.

Putting a pretty wrapper around the candy bar won't make it taste any better.

[Fernando Veloso]

Crappy Pages That Rank Highly - What is up with that?

Same thing with crappy companies making thousands per day.

The secret?

They both provide what others want.

Needless to say *something* triggered that top ranking in Google...

[Tom Goodwin]

Hi Nikki,

I think there is a misconception by many that some how quality is important in ranking in Google, and that just isn't true. If you have good on-page SEO (keyword density, keyword in header tag, keyword in domain helps, etc.), and backlinks with the desired keyword as the anchor text, any site can rank at the top of google. It really has nothing to at all to do with well-written content.

Originally Posted by NikkiS

Hi all,

I'm doing some keyword research this morning, and on page 1 of Google for that phrase I come across a link to a poorly written, badly spelled site (article about how to QUITE smoking) that hasn't been posted to for over a year.

An article featuring my key phrase (nothing to do with smoking btw) was back in their archives somewhere, and yet this site was number 3 on the page when I searched my phrase with quote marks around it.

I really am feeling totally confused right now. Any and all comments would be greatly appreciated.

thanks,

Nikki

[Tom Goodwin]

Originally Posted by theemperor

Might have something to do with the page rank 10!!!!!

I'm surprised it isn't at the top of every search

Sites, or pages, don't rank in Google based upon pagerank...they rank based upon on-page SEO and backlinks

[Ofthemix]

Originally Posted by Matt M

LOL Tim already owns it.

"Make it pass" is the new catch phrase here because that's how we roll in the WF

lol Nice. I'll remember that.

[SVLABS]

Originally Posted by Tom Goodwin

Sites, or pages, don't rank in Google based upon pagerank...they rank based upon on-page SEO and backlinks

Tom this statement is so wrong it's almost funny.

First of all sites don't rank AT ALL. Only pages rank.

Second. The entire purpose of an algorithm is to produce one of several predefined outcomes. And what exactly do you think the outcome of the Google algorithm calculates?

Page Rank my friend.

No not that little thing you see in your toolbar that gets update every few months. No I'm talking about the real (algorithm) PR that is updated instantly, every single time a new page is crawled and (re)indexed.

It's all about PR, always has been, always will be. You need to first work out exactly what PR is from their perspective.

Have you ever seen a google dance? Are you suggesting that this happened because some of my links disappeared then just as suddenly reappeared?

[NikkiS]

Thanks for all the great replies you guys. The message I'm getting here is that Google doesn't give a fat rat's about the actual content and rates on all sorts of other parameters - however, customers do care about the content.

To steal a line from InternetMarketingIQ, the googlebot and I obviously have different ideas of beauty.

[JordanFrancis]

Google bots can't define good quality content in the sense that a human can. Robots are not discerning (yet.) However, Google may use humans to review things from time to time...

As I see it, I'm sure that they would prefer to serve up high quality content in preference to rubbish. After all, it's in their interest to not give searchers a poor experience.

Ultimately it's a matter of being able to determine what "good content" is while being practical about it.

[Tom Goodwin]

Unfortunately, my friend, you are mistaken. Google SERP rankings are determined by a combination of on-page SEO and backlinks (quality, quantity, anchor text, etc.). PR is determined by backlinks (quality, quantity). The backlinks, as the driving force, influence both the PR and SERP ranking, but to say that PR influences or affects SERP ranking is just silly.

Originally Posted by SVLABS

Tom this statement is so wrong it's almost funny.

First of all sites don't rank AT ALL. Only pages rank.

Second. The entire purpose of an algorithm is to produce one of several predefined outcomes. And what exactly do you think the outcome of the Google algorithm calculates?

Page Rank my friend.

Google has one algo which calculates PR and one that calculates SERP ranking. They are distinct, and to mesh them together is pure insanity.

Originally Posted by SVLABS

No not that little thing you see in your toolbar that gets update every few months. No I'm talking about the real (algorithm) PR that is updated instantly, every single time a new page is crawled and (re)indexed.

Basic, common, SEO knowledge.

Originally Posted by SVLABS

It's all about PR, always has been, always will be. You need to first work out exactly what PR is from their perspective.

Again, Google's algo with respect to PR and SERP ranking are distinct.

Originally Posted by SVLABS

Have you ever seen a google dance? Are you suggesting that this happened because some of my links disappeared then just as suddenly reappeared?

Of course not. But, it has absolutely nothing to do with PR. It has to do with Google' absorbing the backlinks for the site, which reflects upon the page's SERP ranking. Got it?

[paulgl]

Originally Posted by CDarklock

Stupid crap like this reaches honest-to-God fame on the internet all the damn time. (Strange people like me are largely responsible for it.) And if you can make your site look enough like one of these idiotic memes, it will shoot right to the top of the search results.

And it will drop back off just as fast.

You rock, as always!

I wonder where people have the time to find this stuff.
I'm too busy doing other stuff.

I read and re-read this thread.

The site obviously does not rank for quit smoking, nor how to quit smoking.

When doing a search for "quite smoking," there is a quite smoking site that
shows, but the title of that blog is how to quit smoking.

You need the quotes as google will change the search to quit smoking.

So how does one get this site in a real search result?

They probably don't. And I still can't believe people spend time
doing stuff like this.

Google is not perfect. Nothing is. I like the 20% rule. 20% of searches,
tweaked just right, can give very tweaked results.

I can't even get a search for: article "quite smoking" to show anything close
to a quite article.

So, you need to tell us what exactly you searched for to get said article,
and what exactly said article is.

However, it would be possible to write an article, title it quite smoking,
and rank it for whatever one wishes.

Paul

[dollarshower]

Sometimes it happens buddy. I have been after the 'Make Money Online' keyword for a while lol. I see that many of those pages sitting pretty on top are crappy and not regularly updated. I guess, link building is the key!

[CDarklock]

Originally Posted by Ofthemix

All of the sites in question don't really fit that viral criteria.

Not to you and me, no. But to a search engine?

A viral site is something that suddenly and without warning has a whole shedload of links.

Just like that piece of crap MFA site that belongs to some dickhead who just bought a copy of Xrumer.

And as he keeps using it, the search engines are sitting there going "holy crap, this meme is really popular, there are links to it on every forum and blog in the known universe!"

But it doesn't take all that long for those search engines to go "wait a minute... we aren't seeing eight million searches a month for this meme!" and they get suspicious. And then they look at the bounce rate for the page, and they go "Hey, you're not a meme! Nobody likes you!"

As opposed to, say, 2204355.

[RichardHK]

Originally Posted by JordanFrancis

Google bots can't define good quality content in the sense that a human can. Robots are not discerning (yet.) However, Google may use humans to review things from time to time...

As I see it, I'm sure that they would prefer to serve up high quality content in preference to rubbish. After all, it's in their interest to not give searchers a poor experience.

Ultimately it's a matter of being able to determine what "good content" is while being practical about it.

Good points. Could it be that a crap site can get into the top spots due to its SEO but earn little money. BUT if the site does earn good money, and gets flagged by a googlebot, a human being takes a look to see what is happening?

[cemrz]

really good stuff. thanks all

[SVLABS]

Originally Posted by Tom Goodwin

Unfortunately, my friend, you are mistaken. Google SERP rankings are determined by a combination of on-page SEO and backlinks (quality, quantity, anchor text, etc.). PR is determined by backlinks (quality, quantity). The backlinks, as the driving force, influence both the PR and SERP ranking, but to say that PR influences or affects SERP ranking is just silly.

Well it seems we'll have to agree to disagree and I'll explain why as I go along so that its clear.

Google's entire algorithm (in fact any algorithm) has a single purpose. To determine the copyrighted, patented and trademarked resulting Page Rank of each page that GoogleBot finds on the public internet.

At one point in time Google decided to offer delayed updates of Page Rank in a toolbar which it now concedes was a very bad idea. The point here is that it's simply a delayed snapshot of what the *real-time algorithmic Page Rank result at a given point in time compared to all other indexed pages for each of the words indexed and cross referenced.

Page Rank itself is the result of those things you mentioned above. Both on-page and off-page, as well as many other on-site and off-site elements all play a part in the result.

At the end of the day the SERP you see is based on who has the highest algorithmic PR match to the given query.

The details (at least as much as has been disclosed) is in the patent information, the official publications and press releases describing the algorithm, and hundreds upon hundreds of posts on Google's various blogs.

Not to mention folks like Rand Fishkin, Aaron Wall, Dan Thiese, Leslie Rhode and the list goes on. None of these folks, in anything I've ever bought or read for free from this group has ever suggested anything like what you are describing here.

Originally Posted by Tom Goodwin

Google has one algo which calculates PR and one that calculates SERP ranking. They are distinct, and to mesh them together is pure insanity.

Do you have a source for this? I have found no evidence, or reliable "expert" source to confirm that this is in fact true.

Originally Posted by Tom Goodwin

Again, Google's algo with respect to PR and SERP ranking are distinct.

Again I'd ask for a source to back this up as no evidence exists that your suggestion is factual.

Originally Posted by Tom Goodwin

Of course not. But, it has absolutely nothing to do with PR. It has to do with Google' absorbing the backlinks for the site, which reflects upon the page's SERP ranking. Got it?

Ahh so what you're saying is that when google shuffles links around, it has to recalculate everything and until it has completed that full cycle for all pages, you're own site might take a dip for a day or 2 until it all catches up.

So I think I've got it. I knew what I was talking about all along and you seem to be getting irritated because you want to convince the world that I'm wrong.

I'm fine with being wrong about this. Just please show some credible source that could give at least reasonably controlled logical result set providing at a minimum the safe assumption that what your saying about 2 algorithms working side by side is correct? I'm not even asking for hard facts.

Got it?

*Real-time was not in fact the case prior to the release of caffeine and was in fact the reason for the "google dance". Each datacenter was updated on a schedule which affected results at other datacenters. The idea behind caffeine will hopefully eradicate the dance for good.

[Reverb]

I know of a guy who claims he makes an average of $150/day from AdSense. He has numerous sites and many of them are really short on actual content. There's not much in word count, and some pages may just contain a small image (like clip art) and that's his content. Some pages are mainly a promise of "more coming soon", but it never really does of course. He puts his AdSense (2 or 3 units) in a prominent place before the "content", but I don't see how he gets away with so little content per page. I'd be afraid to emulate his method for fear of being penalized, but somehow he's apparently having success. Anyway, its confusing how crappy can do so well compared to quality sometimes.

[Bajsich]

It will always be a mistery, but I to have stumbled upon a keyword with 22000 exact global search count. An at the 2nd position in google was a PR0 site when i clicked it , just a 1 sentence forum post. 1 thread - 1 post - 1 sentance.... creepy. I believe it had 5 backlinks and thats it.

All I could think was...ATTACK!

[theemperor]

Originally Posted by Tom Goodwin

Sites, or pages, don't rank in Google based upon pagerank...they rank based upon on-page SEO and backlinks

Thanks I said it with tongue-in-cheek!

[markbyrne]

It could also be a site designed by a Google employee...

Hey! I'm just saying

More than likely as Mr. Sylvester says, Nikki - the age is a pretty good indicator with these types of sites, and I'd look at the number of outbound authority links they have. Google is lending weight to these so much now.

[dburk]

Originally Posted by NikkiS

Thanks for all the great replies you guys. The message I'm getting here is that Google doesn't give a fat rat's about the actual content and rates on all sorts of other parameters - however, customers do care about the content.

To steal a line from InternetMarketingIQ, the googlebot and I obviously have different ideas of beauty.

Hi Nikki,

I think you may be misunderstanding Google's objectives. I believe they do "give a fat rat's about the actual content", they just use a different set of qualitative measurements than you are. They focus on relevance and usefulness, rather than style or comprehensiveness.

Google was the first Search Engine that really tried to truly understand and evaluate content. I believe their superior ability to measure certain qualities of content is what propelled them from startup to the giant they are today.

While I can appreciate the aesthetic beauty of a well designed page or writing style, generally when I'm looking for specific information I prefer relevant and useful pages.

Perhaps Google should offer folks the option of retrieving documents sorted by aesthetic, stylistic or comprehensiveness preferences. I would propose a new search operator - Style:

Some suggested uses for the Style operator:

style:minimalistic
style:complex
style:colorful
style:subdued
style:busy
style:clean
style:brief
style:comprehensive
style:witty
style:sarcastic
style:humorous
style:serious
style:artistic
style:technical

What do you think, should we forward this to Google Labs?

[paulgl]

html5 has many new elements like dialogue, article, section, aside,
summary, etc, and microdata. As it morphs, you may get your wish.

Paul

[MaxReferrals]

Originally Posted by dburk

Hi Nikki,

I think you may be misunderstanding Google's objectives. I believe they do "give a fat rat's about the actual content", they just use a different set of qualitative measurements than you are. They focus on relevance and usefulness, rather than style or comprehensiveness.

Google was the first Search Engine that really tried to truly understand and evaluate content. I believe their superior ability to measure certain qualities of content is what propelled them from startup to the giant they are today.

While I can appreciate the aesthetic beauty of a well designed page or writing style, generally when I'm looking for specific information I prefer relevant and useful pages.

Perhaps Google should offer folks the option of retrieving documents sorted by aesthetic, stylistic or comprehensiveness preferences. I would propose a new search operator - Style:

Some suggested uses for the Style operator:

style:minimalistic
style:complex
style:colorful
style:subdued
style:busy
style:clean
style:brief
style:comprehensive
style:witty
style:sarcastic
style:humorous
style:serious
style:artistic
style:technical

What do you think, should we forward this to Google Labs?

Yes Don, I say go for it: Submit it to G Labs!

On a follow-up, you keep mentioning "relevancy" and to add SERP position, become more relevant to Google on an individual page-level basis, since Google focus granularly on pages.

What are some practical things you've seen others do, to improve their page(s) "relevancy"?

Thanks,

--Max

[dburk]

Originally Posted by MaxReferrals

Yes Don, I say go for it: Submit it to G Labs!

On a follow-up, you keep mentioning "relevancy" and to add SERP position, become more relevant to Google on an individual page-level basis, since Google focus granularly on pages.

What are some practical things you've seen others do, to improve their page(s) "relevancy"?

Thanks,

--Max

Hi Max,

There are just so many practical things you can do it would fill a book. Here are a few you can chew on:

Internal Link Structure

• Make sure that you link to your most important pages from every other page on you website using keyword anchor text.
• Add a content section to lengthy pages using in-page anchor links to sections within that page, using targeted keywords as the anchortext.

Use Synonyms

• Use the tilde operator to locate all synonyms for your targeted keyword
• Add pages, internal and external anchor text links for every relevant synonym

Expand your Web for Each Page

• Make you pages better by linking out to as many useful external resources that you can find including all of our competitor's products. (you might as well rank for their products too ) Use relevant anchortext because this influences your pages relevancy score.
• Get links from as many relevant pages that you can find and build relevant pages on other websites (i.e. guest blogging, article syndication, white papers, press releases, videos, etc.) Always use relevant keywords in and near your anchortext.

These are all signals that are frequently left off of web pages that have considerable influence on your page's relevancy score.

[NikkiS]

Originally Posted by dburk

Hi Nikki,




Perhaps Google should offer folks the option of retrieving documents sorted by aesthetic, stylistic or comprehensiveness preferences. I would propose a new search operator - Style:

Some suggested uses for the Style operator:

style:minimalistic
style:complex
style:colorful
style:subdued
style:busy
style:clean
style:brief
style:comprehensive
style:witty
style:sarcastic
style:humorous
style:serious
style:artistic
style:technical

What do you think, should we forward this to Google Labs?

Hey Don,

I hope you can copyright this idea before you send it to them, I think you could be on to something

I agree with you about the relevance of information as opposed to the look. I've been searching for something so hard today that I don't care if it comes back upside down and in Russian, as long as I find it!

[Groovystar]

What Google means what they say "content is king" is probably more along the lines of, "We're trying our best to engineer our algorithm to place the best quality/most helpful/most useful sites up at the top of your search results, but we're not quite there yet and people with crappy websites keep on gaming our search engines, so please don't add to them and instead, create an awesome site and we'll do our best to eventually get it ranked up highly."