power of content over links

Ali-v-8 · Feb 11, 2010

Every SEO must agree that being on page one of google for the term "SEO" is a prize worth having.
I had to laugh my self silly when I saw at position 3 a website for the term SEO "In My Opinion" this site has got there on mostly content.
When compared to the other website which have thousands and thousands of link to push them to the top of the list, this website has offered unique content by accident.
They don't do SEO (search engine optimisation) they are called Sponsors for Educational Opportunity (SEO).

Confused:|

Google is a source of information and it trawls websites to find out who has the MOST, Relevant information and while all the other websites (optimisers) are talking about the same thing, this website talks about something totally different because not same industry. Google assumes this is fresh new information which it cannot match.
Because this information is totally unique they have been lifted to the top of one of the most prestigious pages for an optimiser.
Funny old thing that Google

OldWelshGuy · Feb 11, 2010

It is a PR6 site, with 5700 backlinks, 50% of which are deep links and many from trusted sources.

How do you work out that it has ranked based on content?

If a site was to go out and get 20 links from highly on topic heavyweight sites, then it could blow the opposition away. it is not enough now to look at who links to a site, it is a must that you look at who links to the sites that link to the site.

Just my 2p anyhow

Andy Walpole · Feb 11, 2010

If you look as well they have SEO in the URL and SEO in the title as well as all over the home page

The site has been active since 2003 and I bet the quality of those backlinks is excellent and purely 100% natural

Ali-v-8 · Feb 11, 2010

Only 25 links accepted by google.
And a lot of them are internal links.
But compare to other websites they have only a small percentage of the links other websites have and they are listed below them.

OldWelshGuy said:
It is a PR6 site, with 5700 backlinks, 50% of which are deep links and many from trusted sources.

How do you work out that it has ranked based on content?

If a site was to go out and get 20 links from highly on topic heavyweight sites, then it could blow the opposition away. it is not enough now to look at who links to a site, it is a must that you look at who links to the sites that link to the site.

Just my 2p anyhow

OldWelshGuy · Feb 11, 2010

Ali-v-8 said:
Only 25 links accepted by google.
And a lot of them are internal links.
But compare to other websites they have only a small percentage of the links other websites have and they are listed below them.

How do you work that out? I checked a load of pages, and they all had google cahe dates, so 25 is a ludicrously low number to quote. Google doesn't show any rhyme nor reason in returning their linked page data to the public, their WMT data is much better.

You say 'small %' but it isn't the quantity that mattaers, it is the value of the link. A single link from a HIGHLY respected website can be enough to wipe out 10,000 weak links.

Andy Walpole · Feb 11, 2010

I count 680 incoming links to the entire domain and 102 to the home page by using Yahoo Explorer

It's an interesting find really. By examining the onpage and offpage factors it shows how to do SEO - even though in this case it was done completely by accident!

Ali-v-8 · Feb 11, 2010

I got bad habit of only reading this.

http://www.google.co.uk/search?hl=en&safe=off&q=link:www.seo-london.com&btnG=Search&meta=&aq=f&oq=

If you want google then is it not common sense to look for links that google accepts.

OldWelshGuy · Feb 11, 2010

http://www.seo-usa.org is this the site we are talking about? just checking so we are all looking at the same site

Ali-v-8 · Feb 11, 2010

It pushes the content theory to a new level.

Here is my question now.

Is it possible to write complete blurb mention relevant terms and push to page one of google?
Me thinks i have an experiment brewing.

Andy Walpole said:
I count 680 incoming links to the entire domain and 102 to the home page by using Yahoo Explorer

It's an interesting find really. By examining the onpage and offpage factors it shows how to do SEO - even though in this case it was done completely by accident!

Ali-v-8 · Feb 11, 2010

Sorry owg, seo-london
Your in .com

OldWelshGuy said:
http://www.seo-usa.org is this the site we are talking about? just checking so we are all looking at the same site

OldWelshGuy · Feb 11, 2010

Ali-v-8 said:
It pushes the content theory to a new level.

Here is my question now.

Is it possible to write complete blurb mention relevant terms and push to page one of google?
Me thinks i have an experiment brewing.

Google have natural language sub algorithms. It will find gibberish pages and penalise them. They developed this sub algo as a result of the auto content creators that flooded the market a while back. .

Ali-v-8 · Feb 11, 2010

Thats what i thought.
But if you didn't write gibberish, but coherent text, mentioning the relevant terms surely it would work.
I am going on the basis of this listing.

I can see how this site got to where it is, I cant understand how google could not see this happening.

OldWelshGuy said:
Google have natural language sub algorithms. It will find gibberish pages and penalise them. They developed this sub algo as a result of the auto content creators that flooded the market a while back. .

awebapart.com · Feb 11, 2010

Ali-v-8 said:
position 3 a website for the term SEO - seo-london.com

It was position 7 back in September 2009 last time I checked, so its ranking has improved over the last few months.

I noticed seo-london.com a while back after seeing another UKBF member here was also targeting the whole seo london term for their SEO business.

Ali-v-8 said:
I got bad habit of only reading this.

http://www.google.co.uk/search?hl=en&safe=off&q=link:www.seo-london.com&btnG=Search&meta=&aq=f&oq=

If you want google then is it not common sense to look for links that google accepts.

Google's link command only shows a subset of the links it knows about. Just because backlinks are not in that list doesn't mean they are not accepted by google and it doesn't mean they do not contribute in the ranking algorithm.

Yahoo's site command shows a lot more backlinks, some from trusted .ac.uk domains.

Some other points of interest:

1. There is a seo-london.org too which is a duplicate site, but also with its own inbound links. Perhaps google has been informed that the 2 sites are one, or perhaps not (if not, perhaps if this was sorted out with 301 redirects the site would rank even higher).

2. The domain name is keyword rich and keyword hyphenated, and according to our earlier hyphenated domain SEO test, having a hyphenated domain can help with passing back anchor text words in the backlink when just the domain is the link

3. If the company itself has been around since Feb 2000, even though the current domain dates back to 2003, they might have had an earlier different domain name with backlinks, which might now be 301 redirected to their current domain and giving SEO benefit this way. Unfortunately back link checkers don't tell you about those other domains.

4. The site users the Silverstripe CMS (an open source CMS from a company in New Zealand)

Annoying Donkey · Feb 11, 2010

awebapart.com said:
4. The site users the Silverstripe CMS (an open source CMS from a company in New Zealand)

Ha! there's your real answer... if it's from NZ then it must be good!

awebapart.com · Feb 11, 2010

I should have added a 5th point of interest:

5. The site is ranking very well for SEO, but it is probably doing very badly in terms of ranking and getting traffic for its intended audience!

Ali-v-8 · Feb 11, 2010

Good stuff.
I noticed the .org but have never seen the .com before this week.
I been spending time on it to fathom how it has got there.
I am stumped, but am sure the domain is only a small part of it.

Before anyone says "why"?

Its because by all rules that are laid down in SEO, there are othere websites that should be above this one.

I still think my theory about the content is valid.
I am going to experiment and post the results in a few weeks.

awebapart.com · Feb 11, 2010

IMO, Silverstripe doesn't get mentioned enough on this forum, we all seem to be fixated with Wordpress, Joomla, etc. Silverstripe is more similar to Joomla, with various modules (blog, forum, ecommerce) and it has a nice admin user interface. I know of a web design agency near me who are quite keen on it.

Feb 11, 2010

Ali-v-8 said:
Only 25 links accepted by google.
And a lot of them are internal links.
But compare to other websites they have only a small percentage of the links other websites have and they are listed below them.

In general I would say you will only get an accurate estimate of google links by having a google product installed on your site.

Earl

Ali-v-8 · Feb 11, 2010

I was using the same comparison tho the other websites on page one.

sirearl said:
In general I would say you will only get an accurate estimate of google links by having a google product installed on your site.

Earl

Ali-v-8 · Feb 11, 2010

I was using the same comparison to the other websites on page one.
all the other websites have more links. (and yes i agree OWG its quality not quantity)

sirearl said:
In general I would say you will only get an accurate estimate of google links by having a google product installed on your site.

Earl

UKSBD · Feb 11, 2010

awebapart.com said:
IMO, Silverstripe doesn't get mentioned enough on this forum, we all seem to be fixated with Wordpress, Joomla, etc. Silverstripe is more similar to Joomla, with various modules (blog, forum, ecommerce) and it has a nice admin user interface. I know of a web design agency near me who are quite keen on it.

I did a bit of testing with silverstripe a few months back, painfully slow
then, any idea if it has improved recently?

awebapart.com · Feb 11, 2010

UKSBD said:
I did a bit of testing with silverstripe a few months back, painfully slow then, any idea if it has improved recently?

I don't know. But the seo-london.com site seems to have decent page load times.

Andy Walpole · Feb 11, 2010

awebapart.com said:
IMO, Silverstripe doesn't get mentioned enough on this forum, we all seem to be fixated with Wordpress, Joomla, etc. Silverstripe is more similar to Joomla, with various modules (blog, forum, ecommerce) and it has a nice admin user interface. I know of a web design agency near me who are quite keen on it.

I've been playing around with it recently and it looks quite good - its written in OOP and MVC anyway.

I see that it's becoming well regarding amongst IT professionals as the 2009 Open Source survey revealed:

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power of content over links