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Pagerank, backlinks, keyword density and Google domination.

Posted by stuart as , ,

I was doing some SEO research for a site I’m building for a friend of mine, who has a local business. This business is a low volume, high return business. (Think finance area)

So I sat down and talked to him about what keywords he wanted to target, and we came up with the two main phrases to go after.

Next step was I chucked those terms into Google, and had a look at the results that we got.

I then had a look at the four pieces of information from the competitors sites I needed to try to optimise his site to grab as high a ranking as possible:

  • PageRank (becoming less relevant by the day)
  • Yahoo external backlinks (including the quality of those links)
  • Keyword density for the terms he was going after.
  • General on page SEO

Surprisingly, the pages he’d be competing against were pretty ordinary in all these areas (the only problem I think we’ll have is that he has a new domain name, we can’t do much about this against some of the competitors with 2 - 4 year old domains, so we’ll do what we can with the other factors)

For search term one, there are approximately 900,000 results in Google.

The second term has 1.19 million results.

The interesting thing is the pagerank -v- backlinks stats. One site has a PR 2 with no backlinks, another has a PR 4 with no backlinks. That’s just bizarre.

Every single one of those pages has dreadful on page SEO, and most of the backlinks are garbage, from link directories and free-for-all pages.

I’m thinking that with five different domains across five different datacenters and private registrations, we could probably tie up close to the whole first page of google for both his search terms, which would be very lucrative indeed!

Muahahahaha, world domination will be ours, it’s just a matter of time!

8 comments so far

Web tools says November 30th, 2007 at 2:36 am

Hi Stuart,
You said: he has a new domain name, we can’t do much about this against some of the competitors with 2 - 4 year old domains, so we’ll do what we can with the other factors.
I was just wondering, is it always that the new domains are punished by Google. In other words, do all new domain names have to pass through the sandbox test.
I am asking this because my domain http://webtoolsandtips.com seems suddenly under the grips of sandbox and the traffic has just reduced to about 10% of the earlier.

Craig says December 1st, 2007 at 11:09 am

I’m going back to the basics now, google stopped liking some of my sites suddenly and I suffered greatly. Going to start fresh. Keyword research is where I will start as well.

Lisa says December 1st, 2007 at 12:10 pm

“The interesting thing is the pagerank -v- backlinks stats. One site has a PR 2 with no backlinks, another has a PR 4 with no backlinks. That’s just bizarre.”

Could those perhaps have been matches that made google think the search was a “navigational query”?

Andy says December 1st, 2007 at 5:19 pm

Im focusing more on my content and the amount of keywords i have in that content. Backlinks don’t work to well for my sites which is dissapointing.

Wi says December 3rd, 2007 at 6:36 am

“One site has a PR 2 with no backlinks, another has a PR 4 with no backlinks.” Interesting, this is probably where the trustrank factor kicks in? I have one blog with no backlinks, which has a pagerank 2 as well.

stuart says December 3rd, 2007 at 9:38 pm

Another interesting experiment is to throw sites in a subdirectory of a site which has been around a while and has a lot of content indexed.

These “mini sites” seem to rank pretty well, even if they’re completely irrelevant to the theme of the main site.

Jewelry Luvr says December 20th, 2007 at 3:07 am

Does the PR2 have the http://www.searchphrase.com domain? For some reason google has been giving a ton of credit for that.

Bob at Blogging For Backlinks says February 10th, 2008 at 5:38 am

The thing I like about your approach is that you are taking a good look at the whole picture, which many in SEO don’t (they have their favorite ‘pet’ method, or over-emphasise one approach rather than using a balanced approach).

Your post brought a thought to mind: one could very easily set up a spreasheet with columns to capture data/make note on various aspects of the analysis…would be very valuable to show one’s clients.

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