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One text link? Is that all it takes for Page 1?
January 21, 2007
I was looking at rankings for auto terms and noticed this SERP for [2007 Ford Explorer]. Notice the site in the #4 spot, 2007fordexplorer.com:
Curious to see whether that site was an official Ford site or just an enthusiast site, I clicked over. It's neither, apparently. Just the words "2007 Ford Explorer" on an otherwise blank page.
So how can it rank for that phrase with just the domain name and that title and simple body copy going for it? Must have a ton of high-quality inbound links, right? Not exactly.
![One inlink to the site ranking for [2007 Ford Explorer]](http://seoblog.intrapromote.com/yse-ford-exp.jpg)
A few things of note here. First, slightly off-topic, is that Yahoo is clearly reading CSS files, just as a few people are discussing about Google right now. But that's not important.
What's impressive is that the page (according to Yahoo, at least, which is about the most accurate source) is that it has just one external link pointing to it. Clicking the Inlinks (1) link shows us the page that's linking in:
And on that page? You probably guessed it - nothing but anchor text to various other pages with only the year and model name (or other similarly shallow text) as body copy:
And this page full of text links has only one incoming link - from its root page. As far back as I cared to search, nothing but garbage links. Maybe I've been working too hard...
All posts by Erik Dafforn
posted by Erik Dafforn at January 21, 2007 11:00 AM
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Comments
you omitted (or never noticed) :-) one ittle thing - a hitslink counter code, presumably it's BrowserDownload account, so one more thing to think about
Posted by: LZZR at January 24, 2007 10:06 AM
Hi Erik,
So what's the secret? With over 2 million search results for 2007 Ford Explorer, how did that lame website and its pathetic link gain such a hot slot?
Posted by: Kanoa at January 24, 2007 10:37 AM
Hi LZZR - thanks for the note.
Yes, I saw the hitslink code, but I really didn't think much of it because it's all encased in "script" tags, no different (I think) than other web analytics code such as Google Analytics, Omniture, etc. So I don't think it's part of what's giving it that rank. Although I shouldn't rule out anything I guess.
Kanoa, I'm not entirely sure. I'm still trying to figure it out myself. I'll keep you posted!
-e.d.
Posted by: Erik Dafforn at January 24, 2007 11:41 AM
Thought the same of the counter code. Could it be that this keyword phrase matching the domain name matching the title matching the content is 100% perfectly optimized? Of course, it doesn't do you much good if you can't add any more content...
Posted by: Garrick at January 24, 2007 02:24 PM
Could it really be this easy to game Google?! How many engineers and PhDs do they employ again?
(Sneaks off to create highly relevant mesothelioma pages...)
Posted by: HyperDog at January 24, 2007 04:48 PM