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. : )

When things are changed in a website there is always the risk of falling out of the SERPs (search engine result pages). For search engines new is not necessarily better and they are all (and Google in particular) focused on trust. Search engines need to trust the new design as much as they trusted the previous one, and ideally enough information needs to be provided to them so that they know is still the same site.

So in order to freshen up the design while keeping enough consistency with the successful former site, we put together a redesign transition plan to break-down the steps needed to keep the rankings that took so much work to build.

Redesign transition plan

1. Url Optimisation. Since we wanted to keep consistency with the previous site and were not going to change site architecture dramatically, the best case scenario was to keep the same SEO friendly URLs with relevant keywords embedded in them and create new ones with the same criteria.
2. Internal Link Structure. We believed that a big part of current rankings was due to an effective internal linking structure that was reinforcing very clear site architecture. For the previous site, we used a site architecture technique called siloing, what simply means to split the focus of a site into multiple themes. The goal behind siloing is to create a site that ranks well for both its common and more-targeted keywords. The main objective here, was to make sure that the site structure remained the same and the site architecture followed the same principles, despite adding new pages.
3. Dealing with the content / adding new content. Since we managed to keep the site structure consistent, we also decided not to make big changes to the content that was working so well, but fine tuning some of the terms used and recommending additional content for some pages, as well as optimise content for the new ones, by optimising metatags and giving recommendations to the content creators on how to write the new content in a SEO friendly manner. Additionally, the site needed to incorporate media formats that could add dynamism to the text content. New videos were included to cater for that need and best practises were provided to optimise them accordingly.
4. Fractionation. We recommended to make the changes in small chunks and be involved in every step of the process, to ensure everything would work smoothly. This way we could manage any risk that could arise quickly and efficiently without being overwhelmed.
5. Monitoring. After the launch of the new design, we kept a very close look into rankings, visitors and page views to be ready for any major drawback. In addition, we tested the compatibility of the new design with the major browsers and gave recommendations on how to sort small incompatibility issues out.

In conclusion, as a result of an understanding of the possible caveats during the process and how search engines work, we and the client were able to keep the same rankings for the major selected keywords, increase rankings for some very competitive ones and increase the number of page views substantially, in addition to give the site a more modern and professional look.

If you have any question contact me on twitter on http://twitter.com/oscarcarreras