The problem with link-based search results.
November 24, 2009
If you've been following my blog for any time at all, then you know that I am fascinated with search engines, ranking, algorithms and the like. It's my dream one day to design a better search engine, and I'm always tinkering and working on ideas to that end.
As I run queries on the major search engines these days, I'm finding that link-based ranking of pages has a major drawback: the most relevant results often don't make it to the top.
Let's take, for instance, the query "acne home remedies". Run that phrase through Google and you'll get back the results that are the best optimized (that is, that have the most in-bound links related to the query).
As of right now, the #1 ranking result in Google for "acne home remedies" is rather mediocre. You have to click onto a bunch of other pages linked to on that page to get to any real information. It's time consuming and difficult.
For me, the number one result would ideally contain a general summary of information related to the query. That is, "acne home remedies" should show pages that list a number of home remedies for acne on the ranking page — not just links to other pages that talk about those remedies. And the top ranking pages should talk about a number of remedies, not just one. Also, the remedies that are talked about should be well known and referenced on other web pages so that I, the searcher, can have a reasonable amount of trust in the information.
How well-linked a page is should play a part, because those links help establish some authority for the page, but they should not be so strong a factor that the links cause mediocre pages to rank the way they do for a lot queries in Google and Yahoo and Bing these days.
So how do we get search results that use linking to help judge authority, but that contain solid information that is reasonably trustworthy?
That's the goal of my latest search engine, Shablast. The way it works is pretty simple, but very effective (in my opinion):
- Get the top ranking pages from a major search engine (in this case, Bing).
- Analyze each result to see what topics are being discussed on the ranking pages.
- Resort the results, showing the pages that touch on the greatest number of popular topics first.
- Filter out the obvious spam.
The results I'm seeing from this four step process are pretty good so far, but I need a lot more people to test it out and let me know what they think about it and where it falls short (which, no doubt, this early in the game it does for some queries).
So what I'd like for you to do is hop over to Shablast.com and run some subjects through it that you are familiar with and let me know if the results are good or poor, and why the results are good or poor. Keep in mind that Shablast is designed primarily for informational queries, so don't expect grand results when doing product-based searches.
You can post a comment here, or (preferably) you can go to the Shablast Forum and post a message with the keywords you searched and what was good or bad about the results returned by Shablast. I can then ask you questions (if needed) and refine the algorithm to improve the process.
If this is something you're interested in experimenting with, why not take a moment to hop over to Shablast and give it a go?
Thanks in advance, and please feel free to post your thoughts and questions in a comment below.
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Niche site case study 2 year update.
November 20, 2009
Back in August of 2007 I decided to perform a case study by building a small, 10 page niche content site from scratch and see how well it performed over time. The prime purpose of that case study was to prove that my 3WayLinks.net network was a powerful way to get sites ranked in Google — and keep them there.
It's been a little over two years since I created that case study, and I thought you might be interested in knowing how things are going with that little content site. Yes, it's still up and running. Yes, it's still well ranked in Google. Yes, it's still making money. No, I haven't done any additional work to keep it ranked.
As a recap, here's what I did:
- I did some research and discovered a niche in the fitness market that I felt was ripe for the picking (today I use Niche Horde for that–it's a lot easier).
- I used my Instant Article Wizard software to create 10 unique articles that would make up the site content.
- I submitted an additional 10 articles to EzineArticles.com so that each of the inner pages would have a few links to it.
- I added the site to my 3WayLinks.net network to grow the backlinks to it.
When I setup this site, there were some dissenters. "Oh yeah," they said, "it does well right now, but Almighty Google is going to catch on and deindex the site, just you wait!"
Well, that's dissenters for you. Over two years later, here's my latest AdSense report from that little niche site that sits untouched, happily generating income for me month after month:
If you were around when I did the original case study, then you might recall that my goal for the site was $3 a day, or about $1,000 a year. As you can see from last month's AdSense revenue, the site is doing much better than that. It actually earned over $7 a day — more than twice my original goal.
But was that a fluke? How has the site done overall? Here's the total 26 month report:
Yup, this little 10 page site (which doesn't look very professional, btw, and only took about 5 hours to create) is about to hit the $5,000 earnings mark. That means that the site has earned, on average, $6 a day since I first created it — twice my goal. It also means the site will soon have earned me $1,000 for each hour of work I put into it.
It has required no extra work on my part, with one small exception: I had a 3-day server outage in January of last year that caused the site to drop out of the Google rankings until I installed a blog and threw up some fresh, relevant content for a couple of weeks. That would not ordinarily be required, but since the site disappeared for three days Google wanted some affirmation that it was not dead and gone, and fresh content was the ticket to get the rankings restored.
I just can't emphasize enough how many people threw up contrary opinions, proclaiming how the Google Deity in its all-knowing wisdom and power would discover and neutralize my 3WayLinks.net network. And yet the site still ranks #4 and #5 for its primary and secondary keyword phrases, and has done so consistently for the last two years — and it is not alone, not by a long shot. 3WayLinks is more powerful than ever since I've continually made improvements to the way the network builds and maintains links to your site.
You may not be able to live off of $5,000 in two years, but imagine building 50 or 100 successful sites like this one (certainly possible considering it only took five hours to begin with). Even if you could only spare 10 hours a week, that's two sites a week, or more than 100 sites a year. Even if you could only reach my original $3 per day per site goal, that's $300 a day, which comes to over 100,000 powerful reasons each year to start building content sites and putting them into 3WayLinks.net.
Please post your questions and thoughts in a comment below.
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What 456 billion links failed to show SEOmoz.org
November 10, 2009
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.
Please post your thoughts and questions in a comment below.
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Like what you see? Then subscribe to Marketing Insiders and reap big benefits! By subscribing to my free Marketing Insiders email list, you will regularly receive special member-only insider information, discounts and freebies. You will also be notified when new articles are posted here at the blog. It's absolutely free to subscribe, and you can leave the list at any time. For subscribing today, I will give you a valuable free gift as well! |
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Jonathan Leger has been earning his living online full-time since the fall of 2004. He regularly posts advice about search engine optimization (his current passion), AdSense and Internet Marketing. 
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