What 456 billion links failed to show SEOmoz.org

I just posted this to my blog:

What 456 billion links failed to show SEOmoz.org

SEOmoz.org has released the conclusions they've reached from analyzing the hundreds of billions of links and web pages they have indexed in their massive database, Linkscape.

There's not much new there, which is no surprise, though it's nice to have some hard evidence support the conclusions I've drawn from analyzing Google's search results for the last few years.

I recommend you read the whole post, but here's the gist:

1. Get links from unique domains to your site.
2. Have the keywords in the domain name.
3. Have the keywords in the title.
4. Don't overdo it with the keywords.

Some of the common myths are busted in there too:

1. PageRank is the holy grail (the data shows it isn't).
2. On-page factors matter a lot (except for the page title, no they don't).
3. Subdomains with the keywords help (nope).

However, SEOmoz is failing to discern a major component of why Google's search results look the way they do. They say in their blog post regarding their results that they don't have the whole picture, because it's clear from their data that although getting links to the ranking page shows a real correlation with the page's ranking, it's not the whole story. The page with the most links doesn't always win.

I am floored that they don't know the reason why, despite their obvious technical capability of building such a massive, sophisticated database.

What they are missing is this: they are not taking into account the ranking domain's authority (the number of links to the WHOLE site, not just the ranking page). They were only analyzing the number of links to the ranking page itself.

I bet if they took into account the total number of links coming into the ranking site they would quickly see why the SERPs aren't based solely on the number of links to the ranking page-some of those results have lots of authority despite having few links to the ranking page.

Wikipedia pages, for example, rank primarily because the Wikipedia site has hundreds of millions of links (198 million according to Yahoo! Site Explorer as of right now), which in Google's eyes makes the inner pages trustworthy to rank even though they have few links themselves. This happens with lots of other sites, too (EzineArticles, Amazon, etc.).

I can't believe SEOmoz is even looking at H tags (H1/H2/H3 etc.). H tags have had virtually zero impact for many years.

Let me make it real simple for you. To rank for anything in Google, all you have to do is:

1. Register an exact-match .com/.net/.org domain name
2. Include your keywords in the title tag.
3. Get lots of links from unique domains

and

4. Don't be surprised if Wikipedia still outranks you (unless you can come up with 200 million links yourself).

It's not that complicated. That's obvious to me from years of analyzing Google's search results. And I didn't need a database of hundreds of billions of links to only come to a partially correct conclusion.

*** In case you want to post a comment: What 456 billion links failed to show SEOmoz.org : Jonathan Leger