#1 with almost no backlinks?

16 years ago

First, don't get hung up on the Pageranks.

Pagerank does not help a site rank higher. Backlinks give PR, and depending on the type of backlinks, the anchor text used, etc., backlinks can help SERP rankings for particular keywords. So, sometimes Pagerank will be correlated with SERP rankings (but not cause and effect), but not necessarily so.

Note that this domain has the exact keyword as the domain. In my experience, that can give a huge boost to rankings, even with none or very few backlinks. All of the other sites in the top 10 are generic auto insurance sites, which are not optimized for "casualty auto insurance" at all. The only exception is the EZA article which is clearly keyword optimized for this keyword.

Basically, i'm not not that surprised.

Tom

Originally Posted by seoed

hello,

I know a site which ranks #1 for "casualty auto insurance" and the site
is casualtyautoinsurance.org. the site has some backlinks but it also had
#1 position when it had almost no backlinks at all.

what do you think could be the reason? is the keyword a low competition one? but please keep in mind that all the other sites for that keyword have high PRs!

would like to see different views coming in.

Thanks
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Highdefinition

16 years ago

Originally Posted by Tom Goodwin

First, don't get hung up on the Pageranks.

Pagerank does not help a site rank higher. Backlinks give PR, and depending on the type of backlinks, the anchor text used, etc., backlinks can help SERP rankings for particular keywords. So, sometimes Pagerank will be correlated with SERP rankings (but not cause and effect), but not necessarily so.

Note that this domain has the exact keyword as the domain. In my experience, that can give a huge boost to rankings, even with none or very few backlinks. All of the other sites in the top 10 are generic auto insurance sites, which are not optimized for "casualty auto insurance" at all. The only exception is the EZA article which is clearly keyword optimized for this keyword.

Basically, i'm not not that surprised.

Tom

Agree. Exact match domain really gives boost to ranking. I also have a site with 7 backlinks and no content yet but rank #3 on Google for 33M competing pages

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seoed

16 years ago

well, I think there could be more than this. its of course right that the exact match in the url will help a lot but I think the acctual site structure of a website can also help in getting higher in a shorter period of time.
I more wanted to talk about this, are there certain onpage factors which effect to rank a site higher then other onpage factors? e.g could just the choice of a template cause a site to rank higher ?

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GeorgR.

16 years ago

Tom,

right now i am pretty "hung up" on the idea of "link strength" which is a direct result of PR & OBL. (Outbound links).

From that point of view i tend to believe that link strength has an influence on rankings (therefore PR must play a role) - together with the number of link of course.

What do you think?

Thanks
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Tom Goodwin

16 years ago

Originally Posted by GeorgR.

Tom,

right now i am pretty "hung up" on the idea of "link strength" which is a direct result of PR & OBL. (Outbound links).

From that point of view i tend to believe that link strength has an influence on rankings (therefore PR must play a role) - together with the number of link of course.

What do you think?

I think the problem with looking at PR like that, is its possible to get PR without helping you rank for the keyword you want at all.

For instance, you could get a ton of hyperlinked image links (which based upon what Terry and I have seen can pass some major juice), but that won't help you rank for the keywords you want to.

Or, lets say, you get a PR7 link coming in with the anchor text "hippo." Will that give your site some PR? No doubt. But I don't think its going to help you rank for "yeast infection cure", even if your site became a PR5 with that inbound link

That's why even if a site has PR, one must analyze the backlinks coming in. The backlinks may not be helping at all to rank for the keyword(s) that you care about. In addition, in my experience, profile links alone can help one rank quite well in the SERPs, but don't help out hugely in the PR department. You might rank well with 500 profiles, but it only gives you a PR1. If you did 500 blog comments (lets say, on pages with PR1-2 or something), its been my experience that you wouldn't rank as highly in the SERPs, but you would likely get a higher PR out of it.

That's why I say that PR and SERP ranking can sometimes be correlated, but they are not causally related.

As for OBL, I definitely don't agree with most of what is purported out there in terms of link juice diminution based upon OBL. Based upon what some out there purport, if a PR5 site has 400 OBL, it shouldn't be passing much link juice as the link juice is diminished greatly by all of the OBLs. But, what Terry Kyle and I have seen is that this is not the case. Time and time again, we see cases where you have a site that appears to be getting all of its link juice from on page, and that page has hundreds (or even thousands) of OBLs. It is not uncommon at all to find sites which are PR4, and seem to be getting all of the link juice from a PR5 page with 300OBLs. According to many "gurus" out there, that is jut not possible, yet we are seeing it time and time again.

Might there be some slight dimunition? Perhaps, its hard to tell. But I you certainly can get a lot of link juice even if the OBL number is high.

Tom

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SGMao

16 years ago

Originally Posted by Tom Goodwin

Or, lets say, you get a PR7 link coming in with the anchor text "hippo." Will that give your site some PR? No doubt. But I don't think its going to help you rank for "yeast infection cure", even if your site became a PR5 with that inbound link

That's why even if a site has PR, one must analyze the backlinks coming in. The backlinks may not be helping at all to rank for the keyword(s) that you care about. In addition, in my experience, profile links alone can help one rank quite well in the SERPs, but don't help out hugely in the PR department. You might rank well with 500 profiles, but it only gives you a PR1. If you did 500 blog comments (lets say, on pages with PR1-2 or something), its been my experience that you wouldn't rank as highly in the SERPs, but you would likely get a higher PR out of it.

Tom

Wow. Thanks dude, this is really valuable information for me! Very clear explanation , especially on the anchor text part

3 cheers for hippo!

Thanks
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Claude5670 16 years ago

casualty auto insurance (dot) org

is made with an extremely good, on page optimization even if the word has no competition it has become a authority listing in a very short time.

not surprisingly, it is made with an auto web site building software. I am tracking thousands of these being billed with exact match domains.

most of them are not doing as well as casualty auto insurance is.
small sample

searchdivorcerecords net
studyscholarships org
vitalrecordsonline org
recordsofmarriage org
riforeclosures org
forexripperreview org
townsvilleplasticsurgeon com
fairdebtcollections org
pizzagreenbay org
goodkissing org

this person and a small group of people are just simply trying to capitalize on exact match domains with web sites that are highly paged optimize.

will it work that remains to be seen
I'm keeping an eye on it

PS: the software is extremely expensive
and the man behind it very intelligent.
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dburk

16 years ago

Originally Posted by Tom Goodwin

I think the problem with looking at PR like that, is its possible to get PR without helping you rank for the keyword you want at all.

For instance, you could get a ton of hyperlinked image links (which based upon what Terry and I have seen can pass some major juice), but that won't help you rank for the keywords you want to.

Or, lets say, you get a PR7 link coming in with the anchor text "hippo." Will that give your site some PR? No doubt. But I don't think its going to help you rank for "yeast infection cure", even if your site became a PR5 with that inbound link

That's why even if a site has PR, one must analyze the backlinks coming in. The backlinks may not be helping at all to rank for the keyword(s) that you care about. In addition, in my experience, profile links alone can help one rank quite well in the SERPs, but don't help out hugely in the PR department. You might rank well with 500 profiles, but it only gives you a PR1. If you did 500 blog comments (lets say, on pages with PR1-2 or something), its been my experience that you wouldn't rank as highly in the SERPs, but you would likely get a higher PR out of it.

That's why I say that PR and SERP ranking can sometimes be correlated, but they are not causally related.

Hi Tom,

That is absolutely spot on and very well said. You described that perfectly IMO!

Originally Posted by Tom Goodwin

As for OBL, I definitely don't agree with most of what is purported out there in terms of link juice diminution based upon OBL. Based upon what some out there purport, if a PR5 site has 400 OBL, it shouldn't be passing much link juice as the link juice is diminished greatly by all of the OBLs. But, what Terry Kyle and I have seen is that this is not the case. Time and time again, we see cases where you have a site that appears to be getting all of its link juice from on page, and that page has hundreds (or even thousands) of OBLs. It is not uncommon at all to find sites which are PR4, and seem to be getting all of the link juice from a PR5 page with 300OBLs. According to many "gurus" out there, that is jut not possible, yet we are seeing it time and time again.

Might there be some slight dimunition? Perhaps, its hard to tell. But I you certainly can get a lot of link juice even if the OBL number is high.

Tom

While I agree with some of your assertions here, I believe there may be some common misconceptions about PR dilution that may have influenced your perceptions.

First let me say that Google does not assign sites PR, instead PR is assign to the individual URL. I realize that you probably know this and I only mention it for the benefit of other readers.

So, lets say that a page has a PR of 5 with 500 OBLs. I believe that the link juice would in fact be diluted to 1/500th of the value of a link on the same page with only 1 OBL. And yet, this does not make that backlink worthless, in fact even at 1/500th of the maximum value it is still just as valuable as a typical PR3 backlink.

I believe this common misconception may be rooted in not understanding logarithmic scales, which is what PR is based on. The difference in the value of a PR5 vs. a PR4 is great (an order of magnitude) and the difference between a PR5 and a PR3 is exponentially greater. If you do not allow for the exponential nature of logarithmic scales you are likely to draw some very incorrect conclusions.

I cannot speak to the experiment that Terry performed since he has not made it publicly available (restricted to his private list), but I would guess that critical evidence, perhaps logarithmic scalability, was excluded from his experiment and led to a false conclusion. Good science incorporates the peer review process to help root out flawed research and invalid conclusions. If you have something, that can stand public scrutiny, that contradicts my assertions, I would like to review it.

Tom, I can tell that you are a very smart fellow by the way you are able to articulate your thoughts. I ask you to reevaluate your conclusions and consider the exponential nature of logarithmic scales. If you are as smart as I sense that you are, you may draw a slightly different conclusion.

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seoed

16 years ago

sometimes I think having a high PR alone can weigh onpage factors more than having a low PR.

that means, even if none of the backlinks have the keyword in its linktext I can rank higher because of the keyword being in my content and tags just for the fact that I have a high PR.

what do you think, could this be right?

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Mike Anthony

16 years ago

People who say tht PR has nothing to do with rankings are saying it wrong. What they should be saying is PR has nothing to do with rankings IF the keywords do not match the links that ultimately gave the PR.

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Tom Goodwin

16 years ago

Originally Posted by Mike Anthony

People who say tht PR has nothing to do with rankings are saying it wrong. What they should be saying is PR has nothing to do with rankings IF the keywords do not match the links that ultimately gave the PR.

What we are saying is that PR and rankings are not causally related. A high PR doesn't help give a good SERP Ranking. To say that PR has something to do with PR just confuses the issue for 99% of IMers around here.

There may be underlying factors (i.e., backlinks) that might effect one, or both of these things.

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GuerrillaIM

16 years ago

Originally Posted by Mike Anthony

People who say tht PR has nothing to do with rankings are saying it wrong. What they should be saying is PR has nothing to do with rankings IF the keywords do not match the links that ultimately gave the PR.

Toolbar PR value has nothing to do with ranking, it is merely a number that when used in conjunction with other metric can give some useful information about a site.

PR is purely calculated by weight and number of incoming links. You can get a PR4-5 site with a single link from a high PR site, but that doesn't mean you will rank. Especially if the incoming link does not have correct anchor text or associated keywords onpage.

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Cyber Rankings

14 years ago

Originally Posted by Mike Anthony

People who say tht PR has nothing to do with rankings are saying it wrong. What they should be saying is PR has nothing to do with rankings IF the keywords do not match the links that ultimately gave the PR.

Couldn't have said it better myself, was just about to point this out until you posted.

I am not sure what backlink checker you use but none of them are accurate, in fact they are far from it.

I have a site that in WMT have 3,000 or so backlinks and in majectic seo it has 80 just as an example.

It could be a number of things helping it rank, even like a simple 301 redirect. Also just 5 or so contextual pr5+ backlinks will beat 10,000's of crappy links these days. Concentrate on the quality & page rank of the links and on-page seo. Not the quantity.

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zingzang

Banned 16 years ago

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paulgl 16 years ago

It's just another parlor trick that people go ga-ga over.
Nobody searches for casualty auto insurance.
No real person, in a real world setting, doing searches
for auto insurance is going to be searching for that.

These parlor tricks make domain re-sellers rich.

This site would not appear for any keywords in the
auto insurance business that are meaningful.

That's the whole point.

In 1 minute, this post will rank #1 for:
blue monkey with purple pants

And the point is?

Paul
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jasonmorgan

16 years ago

In 1 minute, this post will rank #1 for: blue monkey with purple pants

bumping for the warrior forums domination of the blue monkey with purple pants niche!

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paulgl

16 years ago

Yes, that post is now #1 for:
blue monkey with purple pants

Amazing, no backlinks, and PR N/A

Paul

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Tom Goodwin 16 years ago

Congrats.

BTW, did you check to make sure there actually wasn't a blue monkey with purple pants before picking that keyword, or did you just chance it?

Originally Posted by paulgl

Yes, that post is now #1 for:
blue monkey with purple pants

Amazing, no backlinks, and PR N/A

Paul
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- paulgl 16 years ago
  
  I was 100% sure.
  
  The point was, I could buy the domain
  bluemonkeywithpurplepants.com,
  toss some content on it, index it, and rank #1
  for blue monkey with purple pants.
  Then show people how easy it is to rank #1
  by having keywords in the domain.
  I'd think I was a genius and say, see?
  Keywords in the domain are powerful!
  I'm #1 , no backlinks and PR N/A !
  
  Then everyone would chime in, yeah man, you rock!
  Until someone else deadpanned, "Yeah, but who would
  search for that?" And the mustard would be off the hot dog.
  
  Paul
  
  Thanks
  
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  If you were disappointed in your results today, lower your standards tomorrow.
  
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Flaura78

16 years ago

Originally Posted by paulgl

Yes, that post is now #1 for:
blue monkey with purple pants

Amazing, no backlinks, and PR N/A

Paul

Great... So how can we make money of this ranking? Do you know any clickbank products??? I mean I haven't checked this guy's site out and the monthly searches, but: there is still the GEO targeting issue and the keyword profitability. If the keyword was so good he wouldn't rank no. 1, just a guess

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usearchme2

16 years ago

Originally Posted by Flaura78

Great... So how can we make money of this ranking? Do you know any clickbank products??? I mean I haven't checked this guy's site out and the monthly searches, but: there is still the GEO targeting issue and the keyword profitability. If the keyword was so good he wouldn't rank no. 1, just a guess

Err start a craze of blue monkeys and purple pants, if it takes off your quids in !

Woc

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Fernando Veloso 16 years ago

Originally Posted by paulgl

Yes, that post is now #1 for:
blue monkey with purple pants

Amazing, no backlinks, and PR N/A

Paul

What we learned today folks? Domain credibility.
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jasonmorgan 16 years ago

Originally Posted by jasonmorgan

bumping for the warrior forums domination of the blue monkey with purple pants niche!

Mission complete!

blue monkey with purple pants - Google Search

Keyword = owned
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- Claude5670 16 years ago
  
  Man I cant believe we bet out!!
  
  bluemonkeybutt.com
  
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Jayson L 16 years ago

Originally Posted by jasonmorgan

bumping for the warrior forums domination of the blue monkey with purple pants niche!

I bet Allen is making some big money for this keyword now You are way to generious for just giving this kind of traffic away.
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forumer147

16 years ago

I think the reason could be that the name of the domain itself is highly relevant to the site being search out. The name of the domain might have certain effect to the search engine?

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dean1986 16 years ago

.ord domians are going straight to page 1 on google if you have your choosen keyword in the domain, check out out over a number of niches, there making it to the first page with no backlinks, this was discovered a while back and there people making a killing on it at the moment
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Lasse

16 years ago

domain names are really important, ofcourse if you look for "get free insurance" the site getfreeinsurance.com would be ranked high with little to no efford.. soo yeah maybe thats the case with this keyword too

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Gog

16 years ago

Its a very specific keyword, that I cant see many people targeting which is why its number one as the domain is specific to the keyword. If you do a search for auto insurance its nowhere to be found.

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seoed

16 years ago

Yes, that post is now #1 for:
blue monkey with purple pants

nice, but you have to admit that this no-competition-keyword is not the same like a low-competition-keyword

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Josh MacDonald

16 years ago

I am guess low competition and the site name and domain name is exactly the keyword. For example, to achieve the search phrase, gray hat world with the domain being GrayHatWorld.com and the name of the site being Gray Hat World, its not very hard as there are only xxx,xxx results in Google.

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Chicagolimo

16 years ago

I am not a SEO but i think the domain name does play a great role on listing position, i have three sites and all list on #1 position for domain name exact match search.
www-chicagochauffeurs .com for chicago chauffeurs
www . worldwidelimofinder . com for world wide limo finder
www . used car galaxy . com for used car galaxy

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paulgl 16 years ago

chicagochauffeurs.com domain has been around since 2004, PR3.

the others? Yeah. Like people search for used car galaxy or
world wide limo finder. I can't imagine who.

Well, 1 out of 3 aint bad for real world searches, but the limo
site is spot on. It's based in chicago, no less. Nothing to do
with keywords in a domain, I'd wager. That site is #1 for
a lot of keyphrases NOT in the domain, but about chicago
chauffers. It has been SEO'd the right way.

Paul
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cpa-money

16 years ago

redirect 301.

in this way the site owner can hide his links.

just run a test on the headers of the hosting server to check if this domain is redirected

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michaell

Banned 16 years ago

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Phillip M King 16 years ago

The low competition must certainly help this site rate, but that's his point - there's money to be made like this. The site ignores a lot of "necessary" optimization.

He's knocking off minisites which rank on page 1, if not #1, and he doesn't need many clicks to make money. On this site, the click through is worth $7.

IF you believe MS, there are about 120 searches a day phrase match and 30 searches a day exact match for his keyword phrase. He claims to have tons of sites all dribbling in cash. Possible, I suppose, but not my interest.
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- markharrison04 16 years ago
  
  Hmmm...I have a site in the car insurance niche that is number 1 on google. It is very, very niche (think location and type of car) supposedly gets 150 searches a month for the phrase and what have I earned from it so far?
  
  Bo Diddley Squat.
  
  Why bother?
  
  Thanks
  
  1 reply
  
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  Phillip M King 16 years ago
  
  When you say supposedly gets 150 searches/month, is that from GAKT? How many actual bodies do that site get?
  
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poker princess

16 years ago

Keywords in domain names .... wow... this topic has been written and discussed so many place and so many times on the net..... Basically it has very little importance in actual ranking calculations - that’s been the case for years now. The positive effects people see are a consequence of sites linking to the domain using the URL as anchor text - link text containing keywords is what helps the domain rank, not the actual appearance of the keyword in the domain name.

Most of all this is the common mistake SEOs make - differentiating between “direct” ranking factors and “indirect” ranking factors is very important. People just tend to make the wrong assosciations - they optimise a keyword domain site and see it rank for the keyword and assume that this is down to the keyword in the domain. It isn’t.

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Groovystar

16 years ago

Anyone notice there were over 7 million results for blue monkey with purple pants? XD

I think people will search for "car insurance" not "casualty auto insurance."

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SledgeHammer

16 years ago

Originally Posted by Groovystar

Anyone notice there were over 7 million results for blue monkey with purple pants? XD

I think people will search for "car insurance" not "casualty auto insurance."

95% of the people will search without using quotes(").

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DrGUID

16 years ago

Google is also getting better at spotting high quality content, content that precisely answers people's questions, fast loading sites, that kind of thing.

In a nutshell - they're clever dudes!

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selfimprovementedge

16 years ago

I see a webinar where this guy created this website it didn't take so much time. maybe 7min, go and subscribe for offer vault and you will find it. by the way hi did a keyword research on auto insurance he added .org to all the keyword (he get a lof of the org domain) then he see the ones that were free. He used a software to create the website and i think that content comes from an article directory. He have never update his website. ps: the keyword casualty auto insurance gets 6 600 in the global monthly volume research
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