Ranking 7th in Google.co.uk for Davide Corradi

My good friend Davide Corradi dared me to rank for his name without using any of the typical on-page optimisation techniques we are all aware of.  His reason to do this, was his surprise when in my previous post, Google ranking factors distribution graph,  I stated that on page optimisation factors accounted only for a 15% of rankings.

How did I do this? Well, it just took me one hour. My friend Davide is a great SEO, but all the web properties and social profiles where his name appears in, lack a good number of different domains linking to these properties with right anchor text. My challenge was to make the test page to rank for “Davide Corradi” without using the word in any of the highly scoring areas that all SEOs know about: title, headings, alt tags, bolded and italic words, etc. After creating the page, which took me literally 1 minutes, since it hasn’t got any content, I linked to it from the home page of my blog, and added this page to the blogroll to get an additional sitewide link with right anchor text. Internal linking is not enough to rank for a keyword that has nothing to do with your topical theme, but it is a good start to tell Google that this page was going to be important in the site architecture.

After this, I decided to fit a few links with “Davide Corradi” as the text link, in the first paragraph of other web properties that I created for a previous test. These web properties have no PageRank and almost nof links to them, they have nothing to do with the topics associated with  “Davide Corradi” (pizza, pasta, rock music, and bad dancing : ) , but I knew that as long as they were cached, it should be enough.

Additionally, I got a couple of links from two more established pages, nothing too high in terms of PageRank, but with enough authority to give it a bit of a push.

I did a couple of things more that didn’t work. Like creating a keyword rich blog pointing to that page. However, this blog hasn’t been cached, so It has no impact on this result at the moment.

In all fairness, we have to be just with Davide because there are a number of things that make this test flawed:

• “Oscar Carreras” is a much more competitive key phrase than “Davide Corradi”. A previous president of the chamber of commerce in Argentina is called “Oscar Carreras”, and there are more results competing for that query
• My blog is older than Davide’s and has more link equity than his. Authority factors of the page being inherited from the domain, were a big part of my ranking distribution factors post, as part of the query independent link metrics bit within the graph. That kind of proves my hypothesis, but being right doesn’t make the test juster.
• The problem with on-page optimisation is that is a one-off activity, and you can tweak it as much as you want or increasing the keyword density or even trying some semantic techniques (synonyms, related keywords, etc), but in the end there is not much else you can do. Off-page optimisation is a never ending process and even hitting the first place doesn’t make you stop. Your competitors will keep getting links and overtake you if you stop

In conclusion, this was an interesting test, and I wonder if I could get the page to rank first for “Davide Corradi” if I keep working on it. I didn’t use any of the numerous tools in the link builder tool belt, such as directories submissions, article syndication or even requesting links. If this page hadn’t been in my blog, I could have gone more “black hat” on it and use a few shady link generation techniques. That would have made it rank first very quickly but it would have probably be banned straight away. I also wonder if removing the only instance of the key phrase “Davide Corrradi”, only words in the cited page other than the boilerplate ,would make any difference; and if only with the power of the links, with no keyword match within the copy, the page could also rank for the query, the same way that Google did for “caffeine” in the past.  I could have also exposed the page to social media outlets like Twitter or Facebook to see if the social graph algorithms had some impact on rankings, as I hinted in my previous post too, and as my friend Davide did, but I didn’t think that could strictly be considered off-page techniques, so I ruled it out.

A few takeaways:

• Local domains don’t matter. My blog is hosted in the US and has a geographically neutral TLD (.org). The rankings are the same for Google.co.uk or Google.com .
• Google Caffeine infrastructure update is amazing. My page was created last night, around 22. Around 11 AM today it was already ranking 11. It took it around 20 hours to reach the seventh position. This couldn’t be happening if Google hadn’t computed the links I created so quickly. This was the competitive advantage of Mr Corradi, he only needed Google to index his page in order to rank, for me it was essential that Google would index the rest of the pages and calculate the value of the links and pass them on to the page relevance score for the query “Davide Corradi”. We, SEOs, have little excuses now and can’t tell our clients/stakeholders that it will take a few months for our changes to be seen and computed by Google.  Nowadays, the big G crawls the web every day.
• Anchor text is essential. My links wouldn’t pass any authority metrics test. They are coming from PR0 pages with very little inbound links to them.

I wonder if Mr Corradi will buy me a beer now. : )

As an SEO you read about Link Bait day in and day out. Everything very interesting but you can only digest a limited number of Link Bait definitions or top 10 lists examples as link bait. Don’t get me wrong, I am the first one to enjoy a top 10 list but I can count with the fingers of my amputated limb the times that I have linked to any.

For me, Link Bait real ideas are the ones that show some creativity. The economic issue is always there and probably is much easier to write a controversial post insulting someone to spark an argument or invent a story altogether, but what I enjoy as an Internet user, and I really link to, it is useful and funny stuff, most of the times in the shape of a video, software or funny web application.

So from that point of view there you have my favourite Link Bait attempts of all time:

• Compare the Meerkat . The Link Bait spin-off site par excellence. Alexander and his compare the meerkat site has reaped the benefits of a TV campaign too but it quickly went so viral that the spoof site has the same PageRank than Compare the Market but with 11 years less of existence. Fantastic, humorous, funny and effective…as well as useless. But that is not the point.
• Will it Blend. Video related link bait also in a additional site. There is a dilemma whether the subject or your link bait should be hosted in the main site or in a standalone microsite. Succesful attempts seem to point to the latter like these series of videos from Blendtec trying to use their blending machines to destroy all sorts of stuff. This started as a Youtube channel and has evolved to a microsite.
• Doodlebox. This is a great online tool, funny as hell and on topic. Hotels.com has created this online tool so you can scribble around with uploaded pictures and mess around with your friends facial hair or vision impairment levels . Appealing to the primary school student that is within all of us , Doodlebox is a funny way to spend a few minutes and share your “art” with your mates. Flash applications are not the most SEO friendly thing in the world but who cares when the result is so cool. We will have to see how that evolves in terms of links but it is certainly worth sharing.

My contribution is quite cool

• Twitter Grader. When you combine and up and rising start-up in every body’s mouths and a tool that rates “popularity” online the results in terms of buzz and links are bound to come. I am particularly fond of anything that Hubspot do as I find them to be a bunch of cool guys doing the marketing that makes me want to learn more about (as opposed to the kind of marketing that is based on deceiving people). I am not a marketer per se, I am an web developer in background and a SEO for trade, but tools like this make me more accepting of the idea of marketing.

What are your favourite Link bait examples?

Link analysis is one of the most important areas of search engines ranking algorithms. Although some international search engines are less sophisticated in the way they assess link relevance, there is no reason to believe that these engines, such as Baidu or Yandex, will apply similar more advanced link quality indicators as part or the usual improvement on information retrieval techniques, in a similar way that more developed search companies have evolved, mainly Google.

Relying on link quality indicators has the advantage for search engines to avoid the “noise” and improve results relevancy for specific queries. This is due to the complexity of manipulating a link profile, which can be done, but it is much more onerous and time consuming.

More on Link Analysis for multilingual seo