More Empirical Data From MY SEO Lab

[ipopbb]

Attached you'll find my April 2010 Top N Trends charts. There are an analysis of the Top 100 google results for a large number of high traffic searches ranging from online retail to entertainment and news. I use charts like these to test the limits of "SEO" factors and to detect if something may or may not be an SEO factor.

I promise you'll love this data and it will raise more questions than it will answer, but it will answer some too.

I will happily discuss individual charts in this thread and I hope to get new test ideas from you.

About my SEO Lab: I have a VPS Linux server that I don't conduct business on. Its goal is to be a reputation buffer from my actual sites. I conduct all my SEO experiments on that server which I have dubbed the "SEO Lab". I only move SEO tactics to my real sites when they have proven successful in the lab and suffered no attention or ill will from Google and others. Never experiment on your real sites... its just not worth the risk.

I use a grid of 6 "$5/month" PHP web hosting accounts as my anonymization network. They have PHP scripts for funneling google searches round robin. I delay 3 seconds but run 6 requests at a time so 0.5 seconds per 100 results. The grid ties into adwords API and AWS Alexa api and others for meta data. It is all queue based so I can feed a url or keyword into the queue and it becomes part of the "Machine" overall.

I hope you appreciate what was involved in getting this data. It's my pride and joy.

 

[ipopbb]

More Charts...

 

[ipopbb]

About the Charts

* Many charts appear twice. This is because the MAX value lines compress the MIN and AVG lines and there are trends you'll probably want to see. The second chart when doubled removes the MAX value line.

* Some charts use percentages... it will appear in the chart title. Otherwise occurrences

* The trends go from Top 100 results across a butt load of searches to the #1 spot across a butt load of search. Thats how you should read it.

* The "Summary" charts refer to the summary text that google displays with each result in the SERPS.

* Bytes mean the number of characters in the property being tested.

* Matches means the number of search term matches in the property being tested.

I hope you enjoy!

PS BHW keeps quirking my first attachment so here it is

 

[jstover77]

This is good stuff man. Thanks a lot for the info!

One question, what do you mean by citations. You mean references made to that site?

 

[ipopbb]

Some google results make citations to Sections,Books, articles, online documents, etc...using cite tags

Some keyword categories are more prone to this than others...

See the attachment for an example

 

[DataDriven]

Heh, this is getting into the real meat of SEO, good job mate

 

[mustachio]

Thanks for sharing this stuff. I only just joined hoping to find white hat insights, never expecting to find this depth of information.

What about factoring in domain age? Ideally you would factor in active site age but how would you get that information accurately beyond extracting it from web.archive.org?

 

[wulf2ram]

whats the difference between the red blue and green on some graphs dont believe you have mentioned this?

 

[ipopbb]

Thanks for sharing this stuff. I only just joined hoping to find white hat insights, never expecting to find this depth of information.

What about factoring in domain age? Ideally you would factor in active site age but how would you get that information accurately beyond extracting it from web.archive.org?

You hit a hot button issue in my book... I'll go ahead and start a fight with many people on this one....

Domain age doesn't matter... not at all. Not one little itty bitty bit. What people are seeing is "First indexed date for a hostname", which is very different. I have access to 700 domains that were registered in the early to mid 90's and many never have been used as webpages. They have no advantage over a new domain because Google has never seen either before. A.K.A. if its new to google then its new. Google probably used whois domain creation dates in its first year or two but at this point it has its own history of the web that is a better and more trustworthy resource than whois data which is controlled by other people. Domains I have that were used as websites and indexed by Google in the 90's seem to have advantage but the never before used "aged domains" have no extra value and you'd probably be wasting money to buy domain age alone. I'd use WayBackMachine to see if an aged domain has webpage history before buying it. No web history, then no age value with google.

As per your suggestion. Its in my notes to add a graph of earliest WayBackMachine date. That's the closest analog to "first seen by Google" date I can think of. I agree that would be very interesting! Also makes me think that adding a "last cached by google" date too.

Good Ideas!

Thanks!

 

[ipopbb]

whats the difference between the red blue and green on some graphs dont believe you have mentioned this?

Sorry, I only implied Min Max Average...

Red = Max Value
Blue = Average
Green = Min Value
Baby Blue = Percentage

 

[clocker]

Oh my
If I could press "thanx" twice, I would.
This is much better, than genuine "put your keywords, but not too dense", and other broad seo advice.
I'd guess, that you invested money&time to analize the results, to get those tables.
Thank you a lot.

 

[ipopbb]

Oh my
If I could press "thanx" twice, I would.
This is much better, than genuine "put your keywords, but not too dense", and other broad seo advice.
I'd guess, that you invested money&time to analize the results, to get those tables.
Thank you a lot.

You are welcome. Company pays for the lab and my time these days. Find a job you love and you'll never work another day in your life.

Cheers

 

[redrose]

Hi. Thanks for your sharing. My question is for the last two images to know if I understand the data right. So, the top ranking sites have an avegara 1500 words per page and very little links, including to other internal pages and outgoing links?

 

[ipopbb]

Hi. Thanks for your sharing. My question is for the last two images to know if I understand the data right. So, the top ranking sites have an avegara 1500 words per page and very little links, including to other internal pages and outgoing links?

To be verbose: As you approach #1 on page 1 the average looks like 1500 visible words per page (excluding link text) and 140 "full URL" links pointing to other hostnames (not necessarily other websites, but either way).

 

[Numa68]

Wow... ipopbb, this is some of the best stat porn I have ever seen, and it reinforces what I have suspected through casual observation.

Are you planning to do more of these monthly? I would expect that the results would be similar, barring any major algorithm changes from the Big G.

 

[deki33]

Can you tell us what is URL bytes ?
Is it how many chars is in domain or in URL ?
Does it mean that less chars in domain or in URL getting better position ?

 

[deki33]

Also what is with meta keyword ? Sites with less keywords in meta tag are getting better position ?

 

[deki33]

Hm...I don't understand double charts.
For example one with number of words and images ?
Is it better to have more or less words and images ?

 

[frankeh]

I'm setting up a very similar system to you. Lol.
Only mine is designed to find high paying easy to rank keywords.

 

[deki33]

I'm setting up a very similar system to you. Lol.
Only mine is designed to find high paying easy to rank keywords.

Can you tell us more about it ?