A really late night post (was thinking about this on drive home from work…now it’s 2:20 am)….
When you run a search at Google, and are fed the top 10 results, you are commonly given these types of sites listed back.
Overall, the average age of the sites in the top will be 6 years old, and a site newer than 2 years old is very rare. Your chances of seeing a site less than 1 year old in the top 10 of any phrase (that’s searched even a little) will be 1 in 1000.
- The College Paper top 10 Listing (.edu’s). That .edu link that might not have much to do with the topic, but Google will serve you the best it can find from a college site.
- The Government Paper top 10 listing (.gov’s). Again, might not have too much to do with the keyword phrase, but is best they can find from the government.
- The site that has lots of edu’s and some .gov’s linking to it. Googles best guess as to who has the highest "trust rank".
- A huge site’s subpage on your topic. It’s that sub page PR 0 or PR 2 page of a site that has 1,000,000+ pages, and the homepage is a PR8 – examples are Amazon, Yahoo directory page, shopping.com, etc.
- The old page which hasn’t changed in 5 years. With a backlink history of slow and steady link growth.
- Pages from sites that have historically held top positions, and change their content on the pages on a regular basis (Fresh newsy stuff).
- New pages from old established sites (looks fresh) – they fade in and out of rankings.
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Sub pages of old established sites that just got a bunch of backlinks which co incided with new content on that page. (looks like hot news).
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The old sites that keeps updating and keep getting new links (the authority)
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The spam site that won’t be around next month.
I think that for most searches, the top 10 will consist mostly of these types of pages. I think Google does this on purpose to show a variety of Types of pages to the user.
If you’re targeting a phrase, you should start by figuring what type of result your site will be, and what it’s role is in the top 10, and who you’re "real" and "direct" competitor is and what it will take to replace them.
15 Responses
Yeah, I think about Gooogle and what most people use it for, too.
(Sometimes I think it’s just a bunch of bullshit.)
But, you know, whatever.
Thanks, you’ve been great.
If the trust factor becomes more and more important, how can non-english sites get trusted links from edu and gov sites?
I’m just thinking, how in the world do you get a link from a trusted site, i.e. edu or gov?
If you clearly identify all of the possible word combinations, acronyms, semantic word stems and mix up the chronology when building links, you can essentially dominate thousands of searches from gaining traction from the long tail of search.
Add specific exact match link building to get a specific leg up in the SERPs and presto, achieving top 10 rankings become as common as sending an email. Take for example our website, it is only 1 year old, and we have over 4000 unique search compatible keywords. While most struggle to get out of the sandbox, we were ranking in multiple top 10 results, all as a result of authority and content development and using a diverse base of Class C-IP’s to get the juice.
Once you got it, everything you publish goes straight to the top.
I just followed today’s post back to this 2-year old post. You really think this is still true? I am not sure I believe the college paper one any more. And thankfully, it seems spam sites are turning up less and less.
I didn’t realize that age was such a factor. This is also helpful because I wasn’t sure if they liked .edu’s or .gov’s better. Is a page that is frequently updated better than one that is stagnant. I know that sites that are updated regularly are better than ones that aren’t but does that also apply to individual pages?
Think about it. If it were up to you to write the algorithm that weeded out junk, would it not be logical to look at domain age, who is info, .edu , .gov links and other similar characteristics at least in part for determining rank. Over time, cheap little tactical approaches will be stifled… and quality links will hold more and more weight.
For thoughts on how to get links from .edu – try your college alumni site, they often post profiles of alumni and would be glad to give you a link. How about designing a few free websites for some local schools and government agencies and asking for a link in return – very altruistic and “not evil”, which should be supported long term by the mother ship.
Agreed… .edu and .gov links don’t necessary imply that a site should be considered more important. Good analysis though.
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