It would seem that things are tough at the top. Of course I mean the top of the SERPs for terms like ‘SEO’, ‘Search engine optimis(z)ation’ and the like. This is a seriously competitive space for vanity rankings – so I tend to have a nosey around now and then. And whilst we all blog, talk and generally pontificate about writing content that’s worth linking to etc. It seems to be the case that content literally still is king.
But not really in the way I’d hope.
Exhibit A – An SEO Powerplayer
What actually caught my eye and started me on this thread was a sponsored listing, phrase-matching SEO like so:
Initially I scoffed and clicked through to see why, if they were so great at SEO, they’re bidding on it. I saw that they’ve clearly done a lot (too much?) to make the structure and navigation focused on their keyterms but was surprised to see that the site actually looked nice, well organised etc. And then of course there’s the vanity sell…
Started digging deeper then and they do indeed rank very admirably in the natural listings for these terms…
Exhibit B – The ‘Feeder’ domain
Looking briefly at the yahoo site explorer links list I saw a few oddities amongst the 49k links. A couple of clients were apparent and another domain, clickconsult. Now have a look at the sheer amount of content in the source of this site, and tell me if you can find those reams of content on the actual site.
You got it – javascript stuffing. Try clicking on one of these guys:
Now whilst that page truly is a ridiculous example of content stuffing, I was more surprised to see a couple of their client sites practising the same thing.
Exhibit C – The clients
So here’s a link to what i assume is a client website. I’ll assume it’s a client as i’m not sure that flooring is an obvious diversification for an SEO. It’s enjoying healthy positions for what appear to be their target phrases, but employing exactly the same technique to stuff content, now I’d say that was some pretty thin ice but am astonished that in 2009 this is clearly still working just fine.
Totally Busted
Obviously the link profile and strength of the client domain helps:
Links to homepage: 1,054
Total links: 2,013
But according to Linkscape, only a hundred or so of those have particularly relevant anchor text, add the relatively low strength of the other competitors in that SERP, and finally take into account my links/content experiment with James, the content really is the only obvious advantage.
But honestly, however we look at this. Shouldn’t they be hosed for practices like this?