Yes you can rank for crap content

Posted by stuart as , , , ,

About five months ago, I wrote a post here about how I managed to rank number one in Google for a keyword (against about 360 competitors) with just one backlink and some random text in two days.

In summary, I created two pages, SEO’d out the wazoo, targeting the keyword doowadiddy. One page had static (rubbish) content, the other had text which was randomly regenerated every time it was loaded, whilst maintaining a keyword density of between 5% to 7%.

Well I went back and had a look at Google this morning, and I’m still merrily holding down the number one and two spots (five months later!) for that keyword (now with about 580 competitors). The interesting thing is that the page with the static text is actually ranking higher than the page that randomly regenerates the copy with a predetermined keyword density. Maybe frequently updating content isn’t as important as we’re led to believe?

The biggest joke of all is that the static page has received a PageRank of 2! (With no backlinks at all showing in Google)

The static page also ranks number three in Yahoo! Neither page is anywhere to be found in MSN Live search (maybe Live Search is a bit smarter than we give it credit for?).

So what does this mean?

Maybe Google isn’t as smart as we might like to think they are. Surely their algorythms would pick up garbled random text?

I think there’s something in this. I’ll conduct some more experiments and publish the results when they’re in.