google page rank! is 4 good?

That research you did is kind of cool. Did it bring you to any conclusions?

It brought two conclusions, which is that most webmasters in the top 100 of my keyword phrase are not implementing the basic tips I've read in these forums and that the most important ingredient is links with the keywords anchored.

That conclusion comes from these stats:

Observations:
88% have PR less than 6
82% are not listed in DMOZ
45% do not have all three keywords in Title
70% have less than 50% keyword density in Title
75% do not have a <h1> tag containing at least one of the keywords
88% do not have a <h1> tag containing all three keywords
75% have less than 100 Backward links
53% have less than 50 Backward links

(All this is on the bottom of that page).




If they are not implementing the basic SEO techniques, how are they getting to the top 100?

Links, links, links.

Notice that 47% have more than 50 back links showing with the Google link: search. (Reportedly, links must be at least PR4 to show).

Now, the self proclaimed experts and the so-called seasoned webmasters will response with 'yes links are important, but you must optimize your page and you must have content'. RUBBISH!

The page in the #1 position when I did that research, (currently #5), does not mention the keyword phrase in it's title, it has no H1 tag, and the keywords are not found anywhere on that page.

This bothered me greatly, since I had spent literally hundreds of hours following the optimization tips in several different webmaster forums and my site is not even in the top 500. So, I followed about 30 of that sites 60 backlinks. In every single case, their link was on the other guy's homepage, (the most PR), and the anchored text was the keyword phrase in question.

You draw your own conclusions. What I'm saying here is based on research, the results of which are documented and available to the public. If there's any doubt about how the research was done, I am the researcher and I will answer those questions.

In closing, I have not seen this type of research anywhere since I've been reading five different webmaster forums; I find that odd. I am considering doing this same type of research on someone else's keyword phrase in order to verify the results that I found on my keyword phrase. I'm open for requests, post them here.


Bompa

If you ever have the time, I would be curious what you could research on:

health insurance

and if it goes along with the findings you found before.

I might get to that soon.

However, in checking your health-insurance site, out of curiousity,
I noticed that it has a PR7 and over 4,000 Google backlinks and is
not in the top 500, (top25web.com tool). Yet, the #1 page for
'health insurance' has only a PR6 and 800 back links.

This totally disproves my link theory! My world is crashing down
on me!!!

Heeeeeelp!

How can this be?


Bompa

It's likely not only the number of backlinks is important, but also, from how many different servers those backlinks come from. i.e., getting 1000 backlinks from one server might not be as good as getting 100 from 100 different servers.

Before the last few Google updates, the health insurance site I believe was in the top 20. The last update seriously hurt the site. The site lost numerous rankings.

Also I believe Pompei could be right, I think Google also looks at the anchor text now more closely and sees if they are all the same, or slightly varied. If they are all exactly the same it could be likely that the backlinks were created do to link exchange. I think Google wants to give more credit to voluntary links by sites, since it probably means they are more credible. However, I really do not know how they would do that.

Wow!

Are you planning on splitting up any of your sites to different servers?





Yes, the validity of anchor text would be very difficult for Google to judge.

Bompa

Probably not, at least not at this time. Many of my sites are still doing well, but most of the ones doing well have a large variety of backlinks from servers with different IPs. So I am thinking of just working harder to increase backlinks from external sites to increase the variety.

I would be curious if my insurance site would be affected by moving it to an IP with a different class. I would also be curious if just varying the anchor text of links to the site would affect anything. My guess is that moving to another IP wouldn't affect anything since all the backlinks would still be from the same places, however, varying the anchor text may help.

In my opinion the best way to get the ranking back right now are to seek addictional backlinks from a wide variety of sources, and keep the anchor text varying some at these sources. This way both of my theories would be combined.

I wonder how well Google's page rank works. I have a 3 page rank in Google, and I don't get very much traffic. In fact, I started a message board... and it still has no posts. I can't understand how Google works.

Neither can I, heh.

What's your site's URL?

What keyword are you most targeting?


Bompa

Unfortunately, I took down my site recently. It wasn't doing me any good.

It was a web desogn software directory...

ANy clues as to what the formula might be? do u get a point for dmoz.org? do u get some kind of points or weighted average for your link on other high PR sites?

something interesting I noted was that when I started to pay for advertising for one of my sites, the PR went from 0 to 4.

Things that make u go HMMMMMMMMM.....

ps: when is someone gonna put out an open source search engine as good as google?

HNY!

This can depend a lot on the software that powers your site, and the format of your URLs..

Way back when, Google (and even now with some other search engines) they have problems with & and ? characters in URLs.

Because of bad coding (or just unthoughtful coding), many of these URLs are incorrectly passed on to databases. These characters may require escapes in some languages (such as ' and " needing to be changed to \' and " sometimes to be passed through PHP)..

Google seems to have gotten around this one now, and apparently has for a while.

Another thing to watch out for is sessions.

PostNuke, for example, is extremely difficult to get way up there in search engines (especially google). I was on the PN development & support teams for a short spell in '02, so I know many people running PostNuke sites. A few of them have much more content than I do on my site, yet Google only knows of a handful of pages on their site, yet it knows of over 3,000 on mine.

The problem is, PostNuke (and some other scripts including osCommerce, phpBB, vBulletin, and others), pass along the session in a certain way that Google appends it to the URL.

As google and pretty much any automated search-engine/web-sucker doesn't use sessions, a new one is created each time a page is loaded. Google could reload the same page a 1000 times and never see the same URL twice.

This can often be gotten around by placing the following line in a .htaccess file in your website's root directory..



Something else I have done (partly because of the previously mentioned problem with & and ? characters in URLs, partly to simply shorten the URLs so they don't wrap in E-Mails, and a couple of other reasons) is to use the rewrite mod to fake some prettier URLs (Some scripts, such as osCommerce, have built-in support for masking real URLs with more search-engine-friendly ones).

With PostNuke, there was no native support for this, so I had to do a bit of hacking with the theme, and some of the core code/modules to get this working as much as possible.

To give you an example of this... here is PostNuke's default URL for the "News" module.

http://www.reptilerooms.com/modules.php?op=modload&name=News&file=index (Google Page Rank 0/10)

As you can see, this is quite long and ugly, and to a search engine isn't really obvious (and the URL of the page itself - including the domain name, and page's filename - CAN make a difference with regard to how high up the search it shows). Also, if somebody were to paste this URL in an E-Mail, it would wrap in a text based E-Mail (as many of the Reptile related Yahoo groups I'm on are), meaning two, sometimes more, lines of text would have to be copied+pasted into notepad or some other text editor and patched up to form a complete working URL.

With my modifications in place, this URL is altered to show as...

http://www.reptilerooms.com/News+main.html (Google Page Rank 5/10)

As you can see, this is exactly the same page. But as you can also plainly see, Google likes it MUCH more (which is obvious by the page rank its given it - although, the fact that there are several thousand other pages on my site linking to the fake URL rather than the actual URL might have something to do with that as well).

As others have stated CONTENT IS KEY! with regard to getting way up there. While there are sites out there related to reptiles that have much more content than we do, most of our content is unique. Research & articles that we have written.

For example, the Yellow Fungus Disease article was entirely researched by us. Nobody else has done research into this disorder and published it on the web, all of the other people who want to inform others of YFD are linking to us, the news about the new 9th species of bearded dragon (again, note the friendlier URL) that was discovered was an exclusive article as we know the gentleman who discovered it personally, the anouncement about the discovery of of a clutch of Albino bearded dragons that have actually survived more than a few days (something that has never before happened) was news that we got out there first, and because we got it first, many others didn't even bother to mention it, and if they did, they linked to us, because we spoke with the person who owns this clutch and got photos that nobody else has.

And lastly, a little more than a week ago, a Zoo in Indonesia claimed that they were in possession of a 49ft reticulated python. If proven true, this would be the world's longest ever recorded snake in captivity by a clear 18ft (the current record being 31ft, give or take). As soon as I found out about this, I put up a news posting on my site. A week later when this was proven to be a hoax, and the snake was discovered to be closer to 21ft, I put up another news posting as soon as I had a reliable source to quote. I also linked to these articles in my Reticulated Python care/info sheet (which has had more than 200 reads in the past week solely because people have been searching for "world's largest snake" and "49ft python" on Google - when other care sheets put up since then have averaged maybe 30-40 reads.

So, not only is content key, but also keeping that content fresh. If something comes up in the news related to your site's content or theme, mention it. Link it to other articles on your site, and have those other articles link to your news post about it.

There are many other modifications I have made to PostNuke in order to clean it up for Search-Engine-Happiness, but if I got into those, then this would turn into a real long post pretty quickly (oops, too late, hehe).

The main things to remember when creating a site with search engines in mine.

CONTENT - Keep it LARGE (with the most important bits at the top use key search words several times), keep it ORIGINAL wherever possible (try not to replicate content that 100 other people have on their sites), and keep it FRESH (make sure it stays up-to-date! The more often Google notices changes in your content, the more often it will spider your site and find new pages, and update your rankings).

TITLE - USE those title tags. Don't just have <title>Bill's Website</title> on every page. Of course, name recognition is important, so feel free to have that on each page along with a descriptive topic of the page's content. For example..

<title>Bill's Website - Google Ranking Tips</title>

Or, often better..

<title>Google Ranking Tips - Bill's Website</title>

Having the description before the name of your site can make all the difference (especially if your site name is long, and Google truncates it to...)

Bill's Website - Goog... (who's gonna click on that?)
Google Ranking Tips - Bi... (oooh much more enticing)

DOMAIN NAME & PAGE FILENAMES : This is just as important as content & title. With identical content, http://www.joespersonalsite.com isn't going to rate as highly as http://www.reptilerooms.com in a reptile related search (usually).

index.php?something=whatever&this=that&somethingelse=what&is=this&stupidly=long&url=for

is not going to be as prominant as

descriptive-title.html

Even if it's just one or two words relating to the subject, that's what's important.

If you go to google right now, and search for "reptile webcam", guess who comes up in the #1 spot? Yup, it's me.

Because instead of pointing to some impossible-to-decrypt URL it points to the seemingly harmless (Yet descriptive) URL Webcam-main.html

Having the keywords in the URL REALLY does help.

Now, if I've not bored you all to sleep by now, let me state that these are simply my own personal observations through working on my site since it was switched to PostNuke in April '02.

It may simply be pure coincidence that my site's popularity has jumped as each of my changes has been implemented, and you may not receive the same results I have, but hopefully this will help somebody out there

PS. Please forgive any mistakes, it's 6:27am, I've been pulling an all-nighter working on my site (probably like the rest of you) and only stumbled across this forum a couple of hours ago, so I'm a little tired



Please feel free to criticize ANYTHING I've said in this post. Like any good (or mad, as my girlfriend claims) scientist, being proven wrong can be just as satisfying as being proven right, and I'm not completely closed off to the idea that there may be things I haven't fully figured out yet

Btw, something I just spotted... if I go to Google and just search for "Adenovirus" (that's another reptile medical area we've researchd a lot on) my site comes up n the first page, which was rather unexpected given the species-specificality of our article, and that strains of adenovirus affect all animals (there's a type of "common cold" in humans, for example, is a strain of adenovirus).

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