June 2010 Tag Rankings

[MisterGemini]

ipopbb, thanks for the info... i studied all your seo threads and studied your charts and tag rankings and it brought my site from 93 to 6 in 4 days! This site was bouncing around the first page between 8 and 12 for several months, then in June G put it at 70+... this is what I did:

-tried to get 50 keyword matches on landing page
-tuned keyword density to 3%
-added 10 html comments with keyword in the html code
-added a "resource" page and simply made outlinks to the top 30 sites in the SERP for my keyword
-took the first 5 tags I could practically add from your tops tags list and added them to my landing page
-reworked all the metrics I could based on your charts for page bytes, title bytes, meta desc bytes, keyword bytes

I did this 4 days ago and today this site is back on page 1 sitting at #6.

This stuff works.... this first site was just a test, now I am going to do it for all my sites...

Here is my theory: Obviously G wants to rid the SERPS of MFA spam... they know most MFA spammers will not use these obscure tags and give outlink love but many "quality" sites will... so G will filter you out of the SERPS if you are not using these obscure tags and not outlinking enough...

Excellent work! Google does love proper code. Has for a long time. Now it's the pages that count instead of the domain. I think the mindset of the spammer is a lazy one, and that contributes to their poor coding/generation of pages. Thus when you put in this extra effort that effectively making is all the more easier for google to know what you are about, then all the better for your rankings. Look at how quickly this worked for you! Just awesome.

I love hearing these stories of SERP resurrection.

 

[ipopbb]

I haven't heard this term in years. We're talk'en old school here.

I still use it in the sense of "supplemental index ratio", but its really hard to measure anymore... Google locked it down pretty good. The way to view it is the percentage of your content that google thinks is duplicate. You get faster and more complete indexing at better ranks when you tune this down to zero... but its too hard to measure now... takes like 10 tries per page from someone who really understands your site well... ugh... and it cant be automated because the site expert has to decide which values are bogus and need to resubmit... The good news is that if you use canonical tags properly on every page then you'll only have dupes if you do it on purpose. Including 1 tag eliminates the problem and the need.

I don't use them in the experiment and that why I think some test fall off and come back on over time.

 

[MisterGemini]

Including 1 tag eliminates the problem and the need.

By this you mean creating at least 1 unique tag for each page. Correct?

 

[ipopbb]

By this you mean creating at least 1 unique tag for each page. Correct?

Correct... even more specifically only 1 canonical tag per unique page. The tutorials on canonical tags explain it all better than I can... what they don't say is that canonical tags are a big part of the googlebot crawl logic... not using them is hugely detrimental especially if you have a large website or plan to grow.

 

[ipopbb]

how come there's no h2

Tags come and go... except for title... the other float around... h1 is always low compared to other H tags... The current theory is Baysian factors account for the order and supplement index for "considered duplicate" pages keeps pages moving in and out of the result set. Still trying to understand the factors that make the order.

 

[jamesmwis]

Never really used the data in these threads but really like reading them, really thought provoking idea's going on

Always been told that outbound links aren't really a ranking factor but did notice not long ago that it had an impact. I have a client with 2 brand clothing sites; I linked the secondary site to the main one and if anything the secondary site linking out moved up the rankings and the main site receiving the link didn't budge. Maybe I need to use this more.

 

[ipopbb]

Never really used the data in these threads but really like reading them, really thought provoking idea's going on

Always been told that outbound links aren't really a ranking factor but did notice not long ago that it had an impact. I have a client with 2 brand clothing sites; I linked the secondary site to the main one and if anything the secondary site linking out moved up the rankings and the main site receiving the link didn't budge. Maybe I need to use this more.

You must stay current. the rules are always changing and mid february of this year the whole SEO world turned upside down... its a good time to investigate things.

 

[caneman]

If I have a small site, say 10 pages, is the canonical tag worth bothering with, or is it just another way to get my url in the code?

If it is worth it for the small site, would I just use the page url in the canonical tag (I want to keep the url because I am trying to rank different pages for different keywords)?

Thanks.

 

[ipopbb]

If I have a small site, say 10 pages, is the canonical tag worth bothering with, or is it just another way to get my url in the code?

If it is worth it for the small site, would I just use the page url in the canonical tag (I want to keep the url because I am trying to rank different pages for different keywords)?

Thanks.

I wouldn't show google a site without one and your competition can submit hundreds of variant urls to google over time to tune you out with dupes.

Its one tag. And probably the second most powerful content tuner next to title tags, although it doesn't help with keywords.

 

[flaktrak]

ipopbb thanks for some really great info!!! love finding this stuff at BHW. Such a great community.

I have understood link to drink for a while. Actually a guy that worked for me accidentally did it once to one of my sites and it blasted straight up the serps. So it wasn't anything I discovered through experiment, just luck.

But I have one question have you tested nofollow vs follow outbound links? We use no follow and seem to be doing great with that but am keen to know if do follow would help more. I will probably test it on a site I dont really care about in the next month or so. However if you have done the test it would interesting to see what happened?

 

[niksanyl]

ipopbb,
Just curious to see if you had any July tag data to share. I still need to set up this experiment for myself, but haven't gotten to it yet. I appreciate your efforts here.
Niksa

 

[ipopbb]

ipopbb,
Just curious to see if you had any July tag data to share. I still need to set up this experiment for myself, but haven't gotten to it yet. I appreciate your efforts here.
Niksa

July data posted in a new thread. Thank you for the reminder...

 

[niksanyl]

You Da Man!

 

[ipopbb]

But I have one question have you tested nofollow vs follow outbound links? We use no follow and seem to be doing great with that but am keen to know if do follow would help more. I will probably test it on a site I dont really care about in the next month or so. However if you have done the test it would interesting to see what happened?

I have not tested this. I always thought Google would want to see a healthy mix once you hit a certain number of backlinks... I'd be interested in your results if you do run the test.

 

[summertime1]

Hey,
I think this topic is very interesting so i tried to figure a nice, quickly reproducable method to check. You can see my results if you klick here:

h ttp://www.google.com/search?q=qiwzetvbqowiuehqweho328asdfadf&hl=de&filter=0

If you are interested in the script I use, i'll be happy to share

Regards

 

[ipopbb]

Hey,
I think this topic is very interesting so i tried to figure a nice, quickly reproducable method to check. You can see my results if you klick here:

h ttp://www.google.com/search?q=qiwzetvbqowiuehqweho328asdfadf&hl=de&filter=0

If you are interested in the script I use, i'll be happy to share

Regards

You rock dude!

Thank you so much for sharing this publicly! When was the site first indexed by google... The sort order is so different I'm wondering if it is still contending with newness or if there is something about our implementations that is making the sort order so different... I'm guessing its newness because title is a de facto winner right now across my 3 secret words. I was too worried about having other words on page and in the title that they might effect the subtle weights of the tags themselves. So all my tests use a number like 088 or 113 and then I look up codes offline. It might be the number of tests too.. I'm pretty sure tags move in and out of my experiments based on google's rules for perceived duplicates on the site. Limiting to a smaller group of tests may be a better measurement. Your share has my mind reeling... I'm totally blown away.

You rock dude!.

Rep and Thanks given!

 

[summertime1]

I did not really keep track when the pages got indexed, sry.

However, you can easily reproduce my test, just follow these steps:

1. Create a new folder in your webspace

2. create a ".htaccess" file in that folder with the following content:

RewriteEngine On
Options +FollowSymlinks

# Keywords
RewriteRule ^(.*)\.html$                                 index.php?id=$1 [L]

3. create a "index.php" file in that folder with the following content:

<?php
    error_reporting(E_ALL);
    $domain  = "http://www.b-landau.de/";
    $path    = "keywods/";
    $keyword = "QIWZETVBQOWIUEHQWEHO328asdfadf";
    $tags = array("b","i","span","strong","em","apprv","h1","h2","h3","h4","h5","h6","a","p","div","u","cite","code","pre");
    // check if ID is set
    if(!isset($_GET['id']) || !isset($tags[$_GET['id']])){
         // check if ping is required
         if(isset($_GET['id']) && $_GET['id']=="show"){
                  echo "<pre>\n";
                  for($i = 0; $i < count($tags); $i++){
                         echo $domain.$path."$i.html\n";
                  }
                  echo "</pre>\n";
                  exit();
         }
         else
                 header("HTTP/1.1 404 File Not Found");
    }
    $tag = $tags[$_GET['id']];
?>
<html>
<head>
<title>Tag: <?php echo $tag ?></title>
</head>
<body>
<?php echo "<$tag>$keyword</$tag>";?>
</body>
</html>

(in the preview the HTML is black.. if you highlight the source code you can see it, however...)

4. Adjust $keyword, $domain and $path to meet your folder and domain

5. Type your-domain/your-folder/1.html to see a sample page

6. Type your-domain/your-folder/show.html to see a list of all pages created, you can now ping this list with pingdevice.com to get the pages indexed.

7. wait a little and check your secret keyword after a while in google

8. You can add additional tags by extending the $tags array, they will appear as <tag>keyword</tag>

9. Post your results here

Regards

 

[dohdoh0]

How to you manage the "problem" with your subdomains / html file names? - maybe h1.html is better than blockquote.html

And another questioin.. uhm how long are you testing right now? will you release a chart of more month, so there is a better midpoint..

..thanks for your great share!

 

[TMalone]

ipopbb, thanks for the info... i studied all your seo threads and studied your charts and tag rankings and it brought my site from 93 to 6 in 4 days! This site was bouncing around the first page between 8 and 12 for several months, then in June G put it at 70+... this is what I did:

-tried to get 50 keyword matches on landing page
-tuned keyword density to 3%
-added 10 html comments with keyword in the html code
-added a "resource" page and simply made outlinks to the top 30 sites in the SERP for my keyword
-took the first 5 tags I could practically add from your tops tags list and added them to my landing page
-reworked all the metrics I could based on your charts for page bytes, title bytes, meta desc bytes, keyword bytes

I did this 4 days ago and today this site is back on page 1 sitting at #6.

This stuff works.... this first site was just a test, now I am going to do it for all my sites...

Here is my theory: Obviously G wants to rid the SERPS of MFA spam... they know most MFA spammers will not use these obscure tags and give outlink love but many "quality" sites will... so G will filter you out of the SERPS if you are not using these obscure tags and not outlinking enough...

Yeah, so I'm a little late to the party but I just spent the last two days trying to digest all this info and I'm finding out how much of a noob I am at this SEO stuff.

Anyhow, my question is in regarding to the optimization factors above: is the 50 kw matches on the landing page really mean 50 exact match words that are your keyword? If you've got a 3% kw density w/ 50 exact matches that means your pages are roughly 1700 words...not a whole lot but a lot for multiple pages (i.e. doing every single page). Plus it seems difficult to do without sounding unnatural or kw stuffing.

Also, with HTML comments, are those just the comments like at the end of the blog? Or am I missing this too?

Sorry for the ignorance, just trying to get up to speed (and not be a MFA site)

 

[ipopbb]

regarding to the optimization factors above: is the 50 kw matches on the landing page really mean 50 exact match words that are your keyword?

Exact matches don't seem to be what they once were and that isn't how people search in google.

If you search for Pink Ribbon in google the top results will have Pink 100+ times in the source HTML and Ribbon 100+ times in the source html... exact matches (in volume) may or may not be optimal, but certainly not required from what I see in the SERPs... and doesn't appear to be naturally occurring in the SERPs either.

If you've got a 3% kw density w/ 50 exact matches that means your pages are roughly 1700 words...not a whole lot but a lot for multiple pages (i.e. doing every single page).

3% density is way too low in my opinion. Page 1 results are usually hitting 12-15% or higher.

Plus it seems difficult to do without sounding unnatural or kw stuffing.

Sucks, but its a cost of doing business in the new google. See my posts on Spliffs.

Also, with HTML comments, are those just the comments like at the end of the blog? Or am I missing this too?

Nope...
<!-- keywords in HTML coments -->