Google ranking question

by 20 replies
23
This is something that confuses me greatly.

I have the seo quake toolbar installed and of course I look at my links/rank and such compared to my competitors.

There are many instances where the sites at the top have fewer links, a lower page rank, etc, yet are ahead.

And/or the person who is only one rank below me has far far fewer links.

If I have more links than the competitors, the same PR, and good optimization, what is the magic thing that puts them higher?

The one I mentioned in another thread, that hasn't been updated at all since 2007, ranks higher than me, yet has far fewer links and is never updated. The only thing it has is a much older domain name.

But somewhere else I was reading on here said that domain age isn't that important.

So what it is? Any ideas?

(btw, I've been lurking for awhile now and really have appreciated the good information from this site.)
#search engine optimization #google #question #ranking
  • Links are good, but not the end all to be all. You ask about domain age, yes that plays a part also, how much, no one knows exactly. One thing I do know is that the competition for your keywords has a lot do do with the traffic you can expect. If you compete for high competition keywords, you better have your gameface on, or you will get hammered.
  • Domain age is a ranking factor, however it's not everything, If you PM me your site I can take a look and give you my personal opinion, otherwise it's hard to say without seeing your site, keyword and competitors. There are a number of reasons why this could be occuring and I can give you a quick fix if possible.
  • Maybe the site has more topics, articles, posts related to the search term. Possible that they have a couple of really good backlinks which could throw more weight than a lots of lesser quality and irrelevant backlinks. There are a lot of possibilities actually.
  • A reasonable basis for updating site content published on the continued link to the search engines to crawl, so that over time there will be a very significant effect, but it must be text links.
  • Hey ulcseminary ranking depends on so many factors like pagerank, content of a website, domain age, backlink authority and many more.
    If you want to beat your competitor then first of all put a genuine and original content on your website then do complete onpage optimization then work for link building, try to get links for authorative domains (which have some Relevant content).
  • Did you check the PR of the page from which his backlinks originate? A high quality backlink is worth more than several low quality backlinks.
  • It may not be the number of links, but the size of them that is the key factor. Google's ranking algorithm is complex. The only thing to do is to try to master each factor.
  • @John - I need another 40 posts before I can PM you.


    I'm looking at your backlinks site. That may be what I need.

    My site is ulcseminary. org.

    The site that beats me that has no updated content whatsoever is ulchq. com

    The ones that keep kicking my butt are:

    themonastery. org
    ulc. org (those two are the same owners)
    and ulc. net
  • It looks like they both have more links than you, and like Kiril S mentioned above, a higher PR backlink is worth more than in quantity.
  • google only calculating number of backlinks that you got from different resources, domain age is also important factor that minds by google. now a days i feel it is much harder to get top rankings than before, i think its up to google panda update. so i recommend you to get as many backlinks as you can get then feel the change.
  • Banned
    [DELETED]
  • Run your site through a site checker like woorank.com. It is known the Google looks at over 220 FACTORS when ranking a site... that is ON PAGE AND OFF PAGE. Look at the big picture.
    • [ 1 ] Thanks
  • What does the text/html ratio mean exactly? It's not giving me a check mark, so does that mean I have too many links or something? I don't quite get that.
    • [1] reply
    • Still asking about this. I had removed some of my text on the front page because it was just too much text, but now I'm getting a 'too low' ratio.

      Does that mean I have too many links for the amount of text?
      • [1] reply
  • Check the PR of the Links and see how many Links are going out from the site where you got the Links.
  • Personally I think domain age is important after seeing a few niche sites I haven't touched in years get better rankings. I think aging did that mainly.

    I think people often underestimate the value of onsite SEO. Structure, theming, and good keyword selection.

    Another big factor is how topically relevant the links are and how trusted and authoritative the sites the links are coming from are.
  • Remember that links are not the only factors in getting high ranking. There are lots of factors that need to be considered if you want to get your site on top.
  • a good and valid question that you have. There are more than 200 signals that Google uses so I dont have the space to cover them all here. However, what you mentioned above in the brief summary, is that you only focus on the offsite. Is your website interactive and alive with new content and interesting participation..Google love those kind of sites. Another signal that is kicking in are the social media aspects in the algorithms so start embracing that as well. In your case, I would need to know more about your website before drawing any conclusive statements.
    • [1] reply

    • I thought I'd mentioned after that about the onsite. I have optimized my pages with tags, different descriptions, etc. I have fresh videos on quite a few pages, all of which I'm in answering questions. I tweet every day and my fan page is active on FB. I also do ping.fm and do updates there regularly as well. I have a blog on the site that updates several times a day, as well as a forum. My pages all have original content and there are at least 100 pages. So, yes, I've worked very hard at updating the site and keeping it optimized.

      I think it must be the quality of the links because I have a lot of links.
      Still waiting for some of those .edu links I bought from someone here to kick in.
  • Quality matters a lot. May be they are having links from high PR sites and most propably related sites which let them pass more link juice which may be a contributing factor for the PR.
    • [ 1 ] Thanks
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