Can't rank #1 for super easy keyword, WTF?

hey folks,

I'm trying to rank for a keyword, well actually it was only a test setup but now what bothers me is that I can't get to no1 easily - because its supposed to be a VERY easy keyword(look at the screenshot). I don't understand it so maybe someone can jump in and give me some hints.

My site has 8 pages(maybe thats the problem), the main page is perfectly onpage optimized for the phrase I want to rank for, the other pages link to it with the kw in anchor text. the domain is a keywordphrase.comuf.com domain, yea, well maybe thats a problem.

I've blasted the domain with sb aa comments about 6 months ago, until it had about 20k comments linking to it - but after the first 200 links or so, it didn't move more then up to #7. I then blasted it, and managed to get to 5-6. Keep in mind its from my point of view at least a super easy kw, so I did not bother blasting more, and I was disappointed by comment link power. The rankings were stable though. Kw phrase as well as related phrases were used as anchor texts. I did not try to index the links, but since they are aa blogs, someone surely has, and yahoo showed enough bl.

Well, I thought why not try something new on my old test site, and blasted it once with AMR - about 300 live links, with the right anchor text, that should count for something, right? Indeed amr did move my site to #3(quite fast too), but that's it. I pinged the sites, rss feeded them. Well many of the sites in amr are deindexed, so there is no point in trying to index articles that have links on them anyways, but I pinged them anyways... But I found about 80 articles so far in google.

Normally I would work harder on the keyword, there are enough techniques that I would try, but its not work the effort. But why the HELL is a keyword that is supposed to be as easy as this one so f'ing stubborn? Here is the traffic travis screenshot:



the competing domains are in order:

nextag.com
puritan.com
my site
wonderlabs.com
drugs.com
vitaminworld.com
walgreens.com
amazon.com
mediaputz.com
naturemade.com

They are all shopping websites, they have almost no page backlinks, and no onpage seo. What the hell? Heck, I even got the same PR the top 4 have. Actually for a keyword this weak, onpage seo and some backlinks should be enough, should it not???

I believe google has new factors for ranking a site at the top. One of them being how long customers stay on a site, how many pages they visit etc. etc.

I have a site with similar experience. I can't move up higher than #11 although it's an exact match .net and almost zero competition. Guess I started backlinking all wrong, built shitty profiles and comments.

Haha, that's actually pretty funny to look at your number of links versus competitors. I think the takeaway here is that those SB blasts don't do much anymore. Just because they get indexed in Yahoo doesn't mean Google will give them much weight.

I've gotten away from those kind of links and have had way more success with high PR blogposts. I can pretty much guarantee you would be #1 in short order using those. The only reason you aren't #1 right now is likely because the sum total value of your links still doesn't outweigh the domain authority of the sites ahead of you.

I've had similar head-scratching experiences with trying to outrank Amazon, and what I've found is that their domain authority is just so strong that it takes thousands of high quality links and patience to outrank them.

IamNRE said:

I believe google has new factors for ranking a site at the top. One of them being how long customers stay on a site, how many pages they visit etc. etc.

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Hint: Google cannot factor these in unless they wanted class action suits as this is server-side information and not everyone uses google analytics.

mate, your problem is you don't have quality baclinks. Try to get links from relevant content and high PR, you will see the change.
In my experience, nextag is not super easy to beat.

IamNRE said:

I believe google has new factors for ranking a site at the top. One of them being how long customers stay on a site, how many pages they visit etc. etc.

Click to expand...

Hmm, google can't know much about my site - no analytics or other google stuff onsite. But maybe it does for the other domains...

welfon said:

its no news that DMOZ/ yahoo directory etc are of much more worth than ANY blackhat blasts (scrap.ebox,xr.umer,am.r,se.nuke...) blasts or on.page seo :/

all the blackhat blasts are not worth sh1t anymore

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It's time that some bhw members become dmoz mods

navimeister said:

I have a site with similar experience. I can't move up higher than #11 although it's an exact match .net and almost zero competition. Guess I started backlinking all wrong, built shitty profiles and comments.

Click to expand...

ryanjm said:

Haha, that's actually pretty funny to look at your number of links versus competitors. I think the takeaway here is that those SB blasts don't do much anymore. Just because they get indexed in Yahoo doesn't mean Google will give them much weight.

I've gotten away from those kind of links and have had way more success with high PR blogposts. I can pretty much guarantee you would be #1 in short order using those. The only reason you aren't #1 right now is likely because the sum total value of your links still doesn't outweigh the domain authority of the sites ahead of you.

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you mean high page pr manual commenting? Or high pr blog networks? or guest posts on high pr blogs?

I guess, to have easy seo one really has to focus on building authority sites nowadays to make backlinking easier mid term...

navimeister said:

I have a site with similar experience. I can't move up higher than #11 although it's an exact match .net and almost zero competition. Guess I started backlinking all wrong, built shitty profiles and comments.

Click to expand...

I am begining to think that is my problem too. I have a couple of sites that I should be able to rank fairly easily, but I'm having a really hard time moving them up in the serps.

I'm beginning to think it's because when I created the sites I laid down a pretty heavy layer of crap links and now it is coming back to haunt me.

cbnoob said:

mate, your problem is you don't have quality baclinks. Try to get links from relevant content and high PR, you will see the change.
In my experience, nextag is not super easy to beat.

Click to expand...

from relevant content as in a article related to my niche on a broad website(because that's what I have done already with amr, so I guess you don't mean that), or a content related website?

IamNRE said:

I believe google has new factors for ranking a site at the top. One of them being how long customers stay on a site, how many pages they visit etc. etc.

Click to expand...

+1 for this.I have seen a thread where a member posted his experience,the result was...more time spent=high rank!

Jeevs said:

+1 for this.I have seen a thread where a member posted his experience,the result was...more time spent=high rank!

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got a url for us?

semilar said:

got a url for us?

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Nopes...saw that a long time ago.

Jeevs said:

+1 for this.I have seen a thread where a member posted his experience,the result was...more time spent=high rank!

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Coincidence... major websites of mine with 10k backlinks aren't in the top 5 despite a 7 min average time on site, and a 23% bounce rate and a lot lower backlink counts for competitors.

Your logic makes no sense... google does not have analytic data on even 50% of websites.

all the blackhat blasts are not worth sh1t anymore

Click to expand...

Go into million dollar/mth ecommerce niches and tell me how they backlink.
Hint: it's all scrapebox

Jeevs said:

+1 for this.I have seen a thread where a member posted his experience,the result was...more time spent=high rank!

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This is a stupid idea as unless you use Google Analytics how would they know the time spent?

You need to take into consideration that a good portion of those domains are big authority sites.

I've also been having problems with ranking newer sites. Google just doesn't seem to like some of them. I have one that is a 7 month old local site that has 5 pages of content, a PR5 homepage backlink that has very few OBLs, web 2.0, bookmarks, AMR blasts, SB blasts, blog network submissions, etc., and it's been sandboxed for 5 months with a ranking somewhere at 500+. That's just one example. And I haven't done anything crazy with links. Just consistent small blasts here and there.

At this point you need links from PR pages, links from SB and Xrumer will not work here, if you want to hook on first then you need to hook on PR4-5-6 sites/pages, other suggestion : use SenukeX.

Expertpeon said:

Your logic makes no sense... google does not have analytic data on even 50% of websites.

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Thats not my Logic! Mind you! I just read it somewhere and remember EXACTLY what the conclusion was!So there are two ways now,try it yourself or search the forum!

theqavish said:

At this point you need links from PR pages

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Actually Scrapebox is an excellent way to find, sort, and get these links.

Jeevs said:

Thats not my Logic! Mind you! I just read it somewhere and remember EXACTLY what the conclusion was!So there are two ways now,try it yourself or search the forum!

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the conclusion is fallacious. I need not test something I know from experience to be patently false.

Expertpeon said:

the conclusion is fallacious. I need not test something I know from experience to be patently false.

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May be,I never bothered that...