2014 Ranking Factors

I think you've missed the point of the post, it is to not find the common factors that we all know and assume which are on-page seo, backlinks, social media, site design/speed, relevance to keyword.

If the above is the only reason then site #7 should be in position 1. There is something missing, and like others have said it could be the EMD but I doubt it because site #7 has very high PR domains pointed at it while site #1 has a very weak on and off page SEO.

I'm trying to see if anyone can spot a problem and other ranking factors because I see this happen quite a bit.



gazmo said:
There are thousands of ranking factors. What you've written down is a poor guess based on limited information.

But even if you only work on PR links as a ranking factor you'll be fine. Yes even in 2014 ...
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Site #1 backlinks are very weak. They're best link is a link from their web developers testimonial page and a yellow page listing.

Site #7 - DMOZ listing, several PR6, PR5, and PR4 high DA and PA authority sites. Also several same city sites linking to it.

Only guess is that site #7 has some kind of penalty or is a site google doesn't trust. I bet if you throw another 10 PR5 domains it wouldn't budge.


nikita12 said:
You mention that site#1 is an EMD. I would suppose that Site#1 gets a lot of authority backlinks with the EMD as text. With enough of these, the search engines will treat the EMD as a brand name and always show it at the top.

Using your example, if the keyword is "Chicago Divorce Lawyer" if the site ChicagoDivorceLawyer.com gets enough authority back links with anchor texts like "Chicago Divorce Lawyer", "ChicagoDivorceLawyer" or "chicagodivorcelawyer.com", the search engines may treat that as a brand name and when a user searches on the keyword, the search engines believe that the user is looking for the brand and show the result at the top. Assuming the website is good enough and not many users click back and onto the next set of results, the website can retain its rank. One tell tale sign is if the top 2 results are from the same domain.

Another reason that site#7 may not rank well is as "tyang" pointed out, it may be over-optimized. Checkout phpbuilt's bhw thread of keyword optimization. Essentially he theorizes that there needs to be a balance of on-page and off-page keyword density. i.e if you are building links with keywords in them, your off-page keyword density goes up and you should ideally reduce your on-page keyword density to balance this out.

P.S. I love these threads. Brings out the Sherlock in me.
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