I look at a lot of search results every week, trying to parse out why some are ranking higher than others, what Google + Bing are adding to the results and where we might better add value with software. I still feel a serious addiction to mysteries in the search results and can't help but play detective (even when I know I should be doing other work). Over the past 6-9 months, I've been getting the sense that there's something new in Google's algorithm - a metric or set of metrics that looks for some form of authenticity in a site and passion in the content created on a page.
These aren't things a machine or algorithmic system has been traditionally able to measure, but (can I say this without sounding crazy?) I can feel it. Talking to lots of other SEOs in the past few weeks (thanks to events like Expon in São Paulo and Mozcon here in Seattle), I feel better - like I'm not alone.
Finding examples is next to impossible. There's so many reasons a site or page might outrank another that putting up a screenshot of any given set of SERPs feels like an invitation to be ridiculed. But I can describe the results where this feeling pops up:
- A site/page ranks in competitive results but doesn't have the link profile, domain authority or social metrics to perform at quite that level
- It often comes from a small, personal or niche website and is a lengthier article or piece of prose, usually rich with images and well-formatted
- There's almost always a sense that the piece is less commercial and more personal than other results, particularly in commerce-focused queries
- The result feels like it has no SEO whatsoever, often not even a focus on keyword targeting or on-page work. It almost seems to rank in spite of itself, or the lack of knowledge the author/creator has about the rankings process
- It's almost always interesting and enjoyable; like stumbling across a great independent shop in the midst of a big-brand retail district
OK... Maybe I will try to find a result.
Wow. That actually only took me a half dozen queries. It's not a perfect example, but here, have a look:
So it's not the most commercial or competitive query in the world, but all the results, save one, feel very familiar - they feel targeted, intentional and even good. There's nothing wrong with the sites and pages doing some SEO or trying to pull in searches for those seeking advice on walking Seattle's waterfront, but.... See that second result?
Yeah, this one:
There's something different about it. And if you click through (I won't link, even though it's a great 5-minute browse, so as not to potentially influence its rankings) you can definitely feel that Robert Wade, who wrote the piece and took the photographs, has no formal effort to rank for this query nor any of the many combinations of the phrase (nearly all of which contain that page in the top 5). Here's a screenshot of the blog post, which contains basically all of the text in the document (the rest of the post is photos).
If I were to list things that Google might be looking at to discover authenticity through an algorithmic process, it would include things like:
- Design & UI Quality (possibly via quality raters or the machine learning layers on top of user data)
- About/Contact details (looking for authentic about + contact information to confirm the site is created by a real person/team)
- Connections to the rest of the web (social accounts, job posts, a resume, partners, clients, etc)
- Diversity of traffic sources (authentic sites/pages get referral traffic, social traffic, clicks from emails and, yes, some search too)
- An offline presence in the real world (how Google measures this is beyond me right now)
- Connection to other humans (people list it in their LinkedIn profiles, in their Twitter accounts, on their business cards)
Some of these feel like they might be helping those "authentic/passionate" results like the above, but others I'm not so sure. Whatever's going on - I like it. I hope Google does more of it. I don't know how to optimize for it, but that's exciting and interesting and new. And if writing passionate, authentic content on more personal, unique sites can earn more mojo in search, I'd say that's a win for everyone.
Now, please, tell me if you think I've gone mad with SERP overload or if you're feeling the authenticity/passion boost in the algo, too.
I think there is a big distinction between people who run sites they care about and people who simply run sites either as a 9-5 job or in order to make money via adverts.
The people who run a site as a hobby or passion will promote them and work on them for many more hours and do lots of small things which make them far better sites.
Its really hard to put into words what the difference is but I think anybody wanting to rank well needs to have at least one person who really cares about the site and works on improving things every day.
The thing that stands out for me there is it's outbound link profile - all followed, and mostly to Seattle based sites.
For quite sometime now I've advocated linking out whenever possible to relevant, niche related sites and to drop the obsession with nofollowing every link on a site - seeing something like this gives me the feeling that I am right to do so - it looks far more natural and not the work of someone obsessing over PR/link juice flow.
Would be interested to see how the site would fare were it not on the blogspot.com domain mind.
Dave,I think you're on point here. These types of linkings tend to come from people who are more naturally - or organically - writing their pages. They don't care about link juice, rather they care about their passion and want to help others learn about it.
Sorry - what? This bewilders people? Isn't this exactly what Google has been talking about for the last two years? Did no one read Amit's post on the Official Google Webmaster Central blog?
Run through that checklist of "What qualifies as a high quality site" and match it agains that example result:
So, only two slight negatives in that whole list - now is anyone surprised???
Interesting example Rand. It does seem to be the only blog entry in the results. Other entries are Seattle tour guides, local destinations or community groups - so perhaps the algorithm determines the need for diversity in the results; or it could just be that it is the only entry to have waterfront walk in the title. I checked Bing and RobertWadePhoto is also #2 in their results.
Yeah - I'm not sure this is a great example, given the combination of non-competitive results and the Bing overlap. But, it does sort of hint at the more general sense I've been getting overall in some results - an imperfect illustration, but hopefully one that conveys the sentiment.
I think that age + the blogspot factor are pretty big influences in your example too. I enjoyed this post because it was so different. One theory I have is that sites that have ranked well historically for a term tend to stick on page one even when up against competition from actively optimised sites with better authority. - Jenni
I have seen such similar mysterious results in many cases where the search query does not have obvious commercial terms like "discount" or "buy". I am not 100% sure but I have a very strong feeling that Google ranks 1 to 2 listings on the 1st page not as much on basis of backlinks but more on the "authencity" or "passion" factor. On-page still applies to those special 1-2 listings but perhaps to a lesser extent. It makes sense though since if we think of it as Google users, wouldn't we bored of Google looking at mostly commercial websites on top pages (usually the ones with most links and best optimized) - websites that are selling something or have a bit too many ads. I think Google is clever this way as they are keeping users amused as it gives them a sense of discovery/surprise/change from the same old results.There must be several posts with "passion" and "authencity" for several topics, and one could only wonder how Google selects those 1 or 2 to be listed on 1st page. Perhaps, its the length/quality of the article combined with social proof (linkedin, twi,etc) and other factors.
Speaking of 'suprise' and keeping users interested - Groupon does it really well. I spoke to their regional sales manager sometime ago and what I got from him had me pretty surprised. They would rather go out and try to list new businesses with a new kind of service/product, rather than repost similar deals that are also the best money makers (oil change, restaurant,etc) even if it means they pull in less revenue. Apprently their consistent listing of interesting (but less selling), well managed 'cycling' of deals, combined with an interesting writing style, is what makes their visitors 'sticky' to their site.
If Google wants to avoid boring its users, it will probably increase these currently mysteriously ranked passion-fueled results even more in future. It would work in favor of their revenue model as well - more of these non-commercial pages means fewer commercial pages on 1st page, meaning more likelyhood of them spending on PPC.
Ohhh... I enjoyed this post. Thank you.
Rand, I think that you can find lots of these automatically. Run the KW Difficulty Report and find pages that rank in the top three with 50% of the Domain Authority and Page Authority of every other page in the report.
My bet is that these are pages that HOLD VISITORS. :-) They hold visitors for a variety of reasons. Maybe engaging prose, great images, a puzzle to solve, or.... they get you to leave your computer. :-o
Also, these might not be brand new pages... they might have been published a year ago, initially ranked at #85 but slowly climbed the SERPs while accumulating a grand total of two or three links from other domains.
Long term SEO forum watchers see these because posters with an SEO background come in complaining that a page is beating them with 1/10th the number of links, crappy optimization and 0.0001 keyword density. Mozzers complain about being outranked by pages with puny DA and PA. I bet these are the Mozzers who are giving this thread the thumbs down... Fools! :P
Link metrics don't explain everything. There are Wild Card ranking factors. Google still provides a way for smart mice to kick the elephant's butt.
I too, have felt that, and I wouldn't say its too difficult to come up with examples. I like the, "Holding Visitors" concept - I wonder if Google Analytics data is being used.
thanks Rand.
Yes, it was the update to the information in the keyword difficulty tool that got me looking at these sites.
Curiously, it almost seems there is just one that fits this description in many of the top 10 lists - I even started wondering if that was deliberate...
Thanks for the post Rand, you certainly are not alone in your thoughts. We have recently been having similar discussions. In my personal opinion sites that have been “over optimised” are now being penalised by not progressing up the rankings. I would advise, if your site is over optimised and you’re not seeing ranking increases it maybe your sites authority needs a boost rather than more optimisation.
Interesting pattern I must say, but 'site that are over optimized are now being penalized' didn’t sounds OK to me… as this opens the way for spammers to out rank their competitors by optimizing them with too many links…
I think devaluing less quality links and give more value to authentic websites and website’s performance itself still makes a perfect sense to me!
Design and UI, contact Details, Website’s value on Social Media, and more are great ways to monitor websites over all reputation!
I believe Hannah was referring to over optimization of onsite content rather than offsite links. It is already well known that a spammy link profile can cause your site to not perform well, it is not too much of a stretch to imagine the overuse of title text, image alts, internal links, keywords etc could lead to a penalty or artificial sandbagging of ranking. After all it must look pretty artificial if you start to analyse the whole landscape of websites.
Hannah: Maybe it's not the case of overoptimizing, but optimizing too fast. Search engines might give more value to a site that has grown in popularity slowly. At this point, it's all speculation.
I don't think you can over optimize a site by means of on page SEO, unless of course you mean by keyword stuffing or reducing the readability of the page.
I suspect Google is looking much more strongly at CTR, time on page, and pageviews these days and sites with better usability or more interesting content are going to perform better here.
I think Rand is right on too with the traditional business signals (social traffic, emails, local business listings, reviews, etc).
Every once a while when we sit down to realize a new metric been added to provide better results by SE, we immediately start comparing it with other metrics. I guess this is a wrong stance. Over optimized sites can get penalized by Many reasons beyond our complete understanding. It is more to do on case by case basis and even the kind of search whether transactional, navigational or informational....
yes...nice thought
Interesting observation, if a little 'fluffy' for me ;)
Isn't this just a byproduct of long tail search or, at best, clickstream data (hits, time on page, blah blah)?
Interesting article Rand and to be perfectly honest I'm not quite sure whether or not I agree with it yet! From a linguistic perspective there are things that Google could use to determine authenticity though.
I've heard before that Google may use corpus linguistics (the statistical study of language using massive samples of text on computers) and they could theoretically determine some emotive words (that may convey the passion you speak of) that might not normally co-occur with words regularly found within sites ranking for a particular search term.
I'm thinking here of words like 'love', 'glorious' and 'inspiring', which betray emotion and are perhaps more personal. Still, on their own they might not differentiate a 'passionate' site from one of the many others out there, but perhaps Google looks at the relationship between these words and personal pronouns 'I, we, me, us'.
In this way Google could determine sites that were personal and opinionated. Big, corporate, heavily optimised sites will not ordinarily feature declarations like "I love this" or "I found this particularly inspiring". Thinking about it, if Google were to use such a ranking signal, it would only serve to give even more importance to user generated content, which is, of course, personal.
I was thinking as well that generally, someone writing a personal blog post will probably be naturally more passionate about their subject - which often means more knowledgeable / useful, and in Google's eyes, more trustworthy. Both the museum and the .gov site, while fairly trustworthy, have an agenda in promoting Seattle.Maybe the difference between the museum describing it's own offerings and an independent review on Tripadvisor.
Also, people have become more resistant to direct advertising vs more subtle techniques, so it makes sense that Google would too.
Or maybe that ranked because it's Blogspot and Google has easy access to a lot of other information about the user?
I don't wish to sound wholly negative, but I am immediately sceptical of the value of this post because it doesn't present any evidence whatsoever. I'm aware one of the largest pitfalls of SEO is that there are so many hidden variables we will never get a complete picture, but surely postulations such as the one in this post serves no purpose other than to make it even more difficult to build a clear picture.
SEO is very tough; not least because we really do have no clear way of knowing what Google wants (apart from what they tell us it wants of course). My honest feeling about posts like this is that they make it more difficult to get any sort of clear picture about what you should be doing to improve rankings, simply because we are being constantly bombarded with people's theories as to why this ranks and that ranks.
Supplying evidence for the intiution would certainly make it more digestable, for me at least.
Again, I don't mean to be overly critical, I'm merely highlighting that even SEOMoz, who are widely regarded as a resource for best practise, are prone to making sweeping statements. Yesterday's post by Justin, which contained links to actual research papers, was an example of theory backed up with some very solid evidence. I only wish there was some here.
I think I made it totally clear in the post, the title and the content that this is a "feeling" I have, and nothing more. This isn't SEOmoz saying "this is how things are" or even "we have evidence of this." I get the sense that your criticism is based on either not reading the actual words of my post, or on a falsely generated perception about what was said...
I hope that you're not suggesting that there's no room for speculation or imagination around the marketing topics we cover here; I think that would be bad for the blog, the company and the industry.
I did read the post, and I understand that you made it clear it is speculation. However, I just feel that this would have been much better with some evidence.
On the question whether there is room for speculation or imagination; of course there is. You said yourself that SEO is both an art and a science, but I am starting to get the impression that people lean towards the speculative side rather than the evidence based side.
It might just be me though; I'm still quite new to SEO and have been given license to read as many blogs as I like to learn; yet the more I read the less confident I get that what people are saying is of any real, actionable use. It might also be because this post is in stark contast to yesterdays one, but maybe that was the point.
Fair enough - my hope was certainly to mix things up, not just from yesterday, but from my usual posts (which are often very action-focused, e.g. last week's https://www.seomoz.org/blog/how-to-research-local-citations-after-google-removed-them-from-places). I'm sure they'll be plenty more action-oriented stuff on the site in the future, and there's a few thousand good older posts on that front, too :-)
Ian, from my perspective, your points are valid. That being said, I applaud Rand for sharing his insights. I'm not in SEO although I find the topic fascinating. I never would have thought of this unless Rand shared it. Now when I look at search results I will add yet another perspective to the results.
As a result of Rand's post there were many interesting and supportive comments. While in the end it boils down to facts, a post like Rand's allows us to think more deeply. I appreciate the thought leadership I observe in Rand.
Hi Ian,
"I am starting to get the impression that people lean towards the speculative side rather than the evidence based side."
Any evidence to support your impressions? :-)
Oh mannnnnnn. Now I have to have "passion" and authenticity for the products my company makes? I'm part of a very small in-house SEO team that sells exclusively online. For a company like ours, search engine results are EVERYTHING. We try to cover all our bases when we optimize our sites. The thing is, what we make, what we do... just doesn't INSPIRE. It's just not sexy.
Hard to tweet about yet another beige colored widget. Hard to build a facebook community around it, too.
How many times can one write about a generic item, and write about it without duplicating the content, and now, give it PASSION and AUTHENTICITY without experiencing total burnout or running to the corner bar, screaming loudly the entire way?
OK I jest. A little. I like the challenge, otherwise I wouldn't be doing this. But to be fair, I am getting the sinking feeling that Google is making it really hard for a significant amount of small online businesses to compete fairly for the search engine rankings.
Sometimes there is only so much one can write about a widget.
How about basing the criteria on quality? Figure out an algorithm for that. Is the site giving complete information about a product along with the required search engine friendly BS fluff?
For sites that are opinion sites or hobby-type of sites, passion, authenticity and non-duplication of content seem to be easy criteria to meet. For sites that sell variations of the same widget (and a not very sexy widget at that) this criteria can be extremely difficult.
More is not necessarily better . . . but it sure helps in your search engine result pages.
Sigh.
Dear Mr. Plastic:
i feel your pain. And appreciate your jesting about the challenge.
But doing passionate and authentic stuff about beige widgets is not impossible.
From the 50's to the 70's, automakers hired top Broadway composers and songwriters to come up with original material for product launches and corporate shows.
One of the songwriters was interviewed years later on NPR. He said he always charged top dollar for his services because "it's hard to get stuff to rhyme with carburator" and "it's hard to write about sparkplugs."
So maybe you should have singing and dancing cartoon widgets who do a vaudeville routine about how they're boing but essential. Wait, wait...that's not authentic....sounds like something an ad guy dreamt up.
So how about a blog from The Widget Guy? There's got to be someone out there whose life is widgets. Find him! If he can't write himself, do it for him.
Your comments about the struggle of writing copy for unsexy widgets reminded me of something I wrote in a blog post recently:
"Think about the cool or fascinating things that you do for your customers and write about them. The way you view what you do, the extra effort you make for your customers, the reasons you develop a new service (or widget) … all of these things say something to the world about you and your business.
Remember that your business works because you do things that people need and value. Simply sharing these things can do a lot to promote your services without ever having to turn on the hard sell."
Daniel has given you some ideas on different ways to approach the problem and here's another...
Why not tell your widget's "story"?
Beige is not a very sexy widget, but you will fall in love with him when you discover what's underneath that quiet beige exterior!
Beige started out as a tiny idea scribbled on a napkin as Wayne the widget guy shared lunch with his best mate Tom in Seattle on a busy July afternoon....
OK, that's kind of over the top, but intentionally so to make the point obvious. Your product exists because it LIVES for someone! Usually the customer whose problem it solves and the person whose brainchild it is. Find out why it lives for them and WORK IT!
Sha and Daniel,
Thanks for your responses. Truth is, I love to write, but came across Rand's article after yet another frustrating day of trying to find another fresh angle on my widgets, beige or otherwise :)
You all bring up valid points. We're in the process of finding some writing talent for our upcoming projects and that will certainly help the situation -- and free me up to do some of the other stuff I've been hired to do.
I was serious when I said I like the challenge. There is a diversity in what we do, how we creatively face each challenge is one that comes to mind.
And I like what we do because in order to succeed at it, you need to approach it with an honest effort. If you do your due diligence and put forth an honest effort to communicate the necessary information, and pay attention to detail while doing that, you should succeed. Sorta the "if you build it they will come" - yeah like that analogy hasn't been beaten to a bloody pulp by now...
But thanks very much for the feedback, and also to Rand for the article all of which have been very informative.
Your competitors won't be finding it any easier to write about beige widgets. More difficult to bring something new to the sexiest product in the world than to find the latent upside in what might seem dry on the surface but have loads of creative potential!
Blenders weren't too sexy before BlendIt were they? How about a tongue cleaner.... 'sexy' wouldn't even wonder close to its shadow, would it? Orabrush. Making unsexy into sexy gets you more attentions (sales) than an obvious sexy into sexy as many have already done the obvious one.
Yep, the same sort of gut feel that led me to write recently about a swing in ranking factors over at G+.
It seems that we are seeing another big shift in SEO as happens every once in a while when SEO's distort rankings too greatly by over-gaming the system. This time it's link building that has devalued the link graph as a ranking factor. Before that it was alt tag stuffing, before that meta keyword tag abuse...and so it goes on.
Now the computing power exists to do some really smart on page analysis not only of content but also of meaning, look, feel and uniqueness. I think it's pretty clear that there will be an increasing scrutiny of on page factors which now emerge as less easy to game than off page factors.
Google regularly throws curve balls into the first SERP... I'm not sure I see anything here that goes beyond that save the explanation of diversity of results (I know that Rand has already called out mea culpa on this not being a stellar example). This could possibly be a manual review... I can't say for sure.
It has been my experience that it’s pretty hard for a subdomain, especially one on Blogspot, with no Page Authority or inbound links to rise to the top of the search results. This seems very strange indeed. Maybe Google is trying to 'humanize' its results somehow through manual review. I have a hard time believing that they’re able to do this algorithmically though.
I work in many market verticals and frequently see strange birds like this. It’s certainly worth the effort to look at commonalities and discern patterns to make sense of the results. So in the spirit of not sounding totally cynical to the idea of passion and authenticity… I say nice food for thought. :-)
This particular blogspot subdomain has hundreds of links to it with the word seattle in the anchor text (not that google page rank affects rankings) but the subdomain is a PR 5 which is a clear indication of "Authority" and definetly relevance considering the content throughout the site and the linking anchor text.
I normally don't even comment - but this post makes me feel that Rand and some of the "pros" commenting are either not paying attention or writting this stuff to throw others off track.
Admittedly, I was only looking at MOZbar metrics (ahem) but you're right, the site does appear have inbound links when using the "links:command" for google - but its link graph also has a relatively weak max page authority. You also missed my overall point that this site is definitely an outlier on the Bell Curve. For all intents and purposes, it shouldn't be on the 1st SERP. Subdomains on the large free hosting sites like WP and Blogspot are incredibly difficult to rank unless you are manipulating anchor text and doing all the usual tricks (even then difficult to rank unless there's huge amounts of content, etc).
As far as the "pros" specifically trying to throw you off... sounds like tin-foil hat society stuff to me. :-) The table chat is a "what if" or "what could be" not a "what is" conversation. Using PR as a vector of attack (really?) as an indication of site authority is just well, it makes my ears hurt. :-) This is just me ribbing you brother - not looking for a pissing match. Be well.
I hear you - actually I think I did get a little "tin-foil hat" on this one. I really don't think its a conspiracy - but there is a lot of apparent reasons for the serp - and it seems like everyone is looking beyond the obvious.
what are some of the obvious signs for you? Would definitely like to hear and always like to have my perceptions changed with good evidence.
I'm just going to throw this out there. Maybe the "passion" comes from statistics on that blog or site that Google is able to tap into (this site being a Blogspot blog, Google has all the info it needs). Two of the metrics it could easily pull would be time on site and # pages/visit. If these are both high compared to the average, it means people are spending a lot of time there comparatively.
If people spend more time on a site looking around and visiting a lot of pages, it's probably a good indicator of good content, right? Maybe that's one of the "passion" factors?
hmmm i'm understanding it's a big lighter post than usual but agree it's not really main blog material, it would have been great groundwork for a whiteboard friday or the base of a more indepth post.
Also I surprised to not see a link out no matter if it influences his rankings it's a nice collection of photos and you make reference to his blog.
I would also assume it might be linked to google's recent "image intention" based algorithm so it assumes people looking for that phrase is looking for sites with lots of images.
His blog has three factors in his favour, one is a link from his main site and also it's hosted on Blogspot. It's not meant to make a difference but i've seen very light blogspot blogs rank fairly well even my own without much effort. The final part is the massive amount of photos/posts he has done and likely a few would suspect he has GEO data coded to the photos to re-enforce that they are located around Seattle.
I'm a strong supporter of your writing style and insight but i was hoping for more... but do agree some weird shit appears at times :)
The author of the waterfront walk article mentions the "Olympic Sculpture Park" - and appears to link that phrase out to seattletimes.nwsource.com - could a single external link to a potential authority source be of that much influence...?
Hm, interesting point.
I see more and more SEO people say that do follow links to autrorative websites help the rankings.
Another idea may be that google wants to diversify the results. Maybe Google wants to have a different range of results on the home page (with different prospective) and point of views.
Either way I'll keep my eyes open.
Interesting that it's related to a local search...
Lovely post, I too hope that this is for real. To much SEO can be frustrating to read even though it IS good for the search aswell. It will be interesting to follow this and see if it is real.
Question, if now google is trying to rule out "machine/adsenseblogs material from the top results" wouldnt they loose money? Are they really that cool?
I do think Google is that cool. There might be a short-term loss, however, if Rand is correct, huge upside potential with users depending on search results like this even more.
Good thoughts Bjorn.
Rand, I had the same thing running in my mind and I got to ask many people at the mozcon. Few months back it was not quite possible for any sites to outrank the .gov sites and if you see thats beeing gone now. For long tails and keywords with very little competition I think the website platforms (wordpress and blogger in this case) are doing the majority of SEO. It is very clear that Wade dint do any SEO for the site and still getting ranked well. I am not sure what signals google was watching in it, but if someone like you bought this thing up, it would nt be much time where people can figure out what is actualy happening. I am gladd to read that it is a win-win situation for everyone. I like the way SEO industry changes time to time. Change is always good.
Great post Rand! Like many of the others above, I think authentic search results are better for users, and engines are evidentally focusing more on the most legitimate source of information, be that a blogspot post or a related tweet. It's funny, on my way home from MozCon, I was looking for information about the Seattle light rail and how long it would take to get there from downtown. I searched "seattle light rail downtown to airport" and was surprised to see a post from Airline Reporter, a very personal blog about the aviation industry, near the top of the SERPs (#4). From a user's prospective, it was everything I needed to know and more, and a much better resource than soundtransit.org. Pretty interesting stuff, thanks for sharing your thoughts!
We have identified the same type of situation you describe in many reputation management situations. I can easily think of 10 examples where one of the top listings seems to have it's own vitamins that make it thrive without the usual links, authority, etc. Typically it's a blog post on a blog with a low PR but, per Rand's description it's a very passionate writer. Someone who cares about the subject and sometimes they have written about this subject in more than one post.
These results seem to be impervious to movement. In rep management it could be a blog post complaining about a specific brand or a not-so-positive rant about a person.
We had always chalked it up to a different cause. I called it the "Aha! Result" it's usually the non-obvious result that Google realized was reAlly relevant despite it not being authoritative or highly linked. Sometimes it seems to be there because it represents a strong association that Google has identified. For example Joe is a Real Estate guy. One of the results represents a complaint on a blog, the rest are corporate info, press releases or exact name matches. Guess which one Google places at #2? Aha! Google nailed it!
This seems to happen only with non-competitive terms and can eventually be dislodged in many cases.
I think you may be right that passion may be part of it - but I think it may be other factors like how tightly focused is the content of the blog. And maybe it's specifically the fact that this result is so different. Also these Aha Results tend to be engaging - the articles are engaging and titles usually are as well - so you get Hightower CTR and people stay on the site for an extended period if time.
That's my two cents.
Sam Michelson Five Blocks
I really hope this is right - I'd love to be able to beat the same six multinational sites with their generic content and zillion links! Did you check Stumble Upon numbers? I wrote an article (picture blog) that shows up really high in some random searchs, no keywording/onpage optimisation at all - but gets TONS and TONS of traffic for my client - and the only thing we can think is it has had 90 000 stumble likes.
The old saying we seo's had, "Content Is King", seems evolving to new one, "Natural, Passionate and Useful Content Is The King"
Hello i am recently shocked by google too on 5th Aug When they update the PR of my website now why i was shocked because i had never done backlinks for my website and if i had so may be ten to fifteen backlinks and i am not sure that only 10 to 15 backlinks can take you to PR 2 from PR 0 also the domain age is 3 months i was so much shocked when i get to see that i have a PR 2 and yeah the content on my website is in really bad english that does not allow me to say that my PR got higher because of Quality Content i know there is no quality in my content but jst Quantity i am still finding answer that how google can update my PR when i had not put any efforts is it that easy to get a Google PR2 ?
Nice post. No I actually mean it.
It's like taking the science and coldness out of SEO and giving it a warm cosy blanket.
If SEO is heading that way that surely can't be bad.
Maybe Google is trying to cater for our 'human sides' or maybe we are all becoming our human and social ways back where they belong.
Wow, maybe I'm going crazy. This love thing thing sure is contagious...
I've been seeing the same thing in the past 6-12 months, so I too am glad to hear I'm not crazy!
Lack of competition certainly plays a role in this as a few people have mentioned, but with traditional SEO knowledge, strength of competition would still force the more "powerful" results above the "passionate" results, right?
This is very interesting, and seems to play right into the Google Panda Questionnaire and suspicions many brilliant SEOs have had for years in terms of metrics and elements the engines are looking for.
Thanks for the insight and example Rand.
Rand, you've always been a little wacky about the SERPS... it's just your own authenticity and passion shining through! :P
That being said, that particular listing has Age and Locality on it's side, for what is definitely a Geo-Local query. It's also local to you, as indicated by your screen-shot... so there are some "logical" reasons for it to rank under the currently acknowledged ranking paradigms, but even still I think I get where you're going.
Google has always been about presenting data by humans, for humans in a humane way. The core of their algorithms focus on simple, universal concepts that are native to social cultures; things like sharing is caring, we vouch for good people/information, etc.
Owing to this fact, the more time goes on, the more Google learns about (and in many cases influences) how users seek information and interact with it. This in turn informs their algorithm, which seems to have taken a strong shift back towards content and it's context with the Panda updates.
Content has always been king, because good content gets shared and vouched for(linked to); but now context and culture come into play as Google is able to understand the user intent of more of their queries.
This semantic understanding has become very important to delivering quality content via the SERPS, and balancing the algorithm against attempts to artificially engineer authority through manipulating the Link Graph or weighty Term Targeting.
In short, the algorithm has begun to learn what humans intuitively know: the difference between a corporate spit-shine, and an authentic experience. Through this, GoogleBot has found that Authenticity usually leads to better quality.
Anywho, thanks for this thought provoking post. Keep being wacky, because that's you keeping it real ;-)
Design & UI Quality - can anyone give explanation.
You haven't gone crazy. This is the Rand that I've come to appreciate with his passion for SEO.
Sometimes I feel that the online world is starting to become a reflection of the offline world. I look at SERPs and I see sites that are ranking for no reason or with black hat tactics and I am reminded of cities which have a good side which is visible and a bad side which is not so visible.
You can call me crazy if you'd like but when I look at parking lots, my mind starts ranting about the poor usability and conversion paths. :)
Cheers,
Jey
Interesting thoughts! I hope you are right ;-)
I run three hobby blogs myself.
I read your posts so I must be doing SEO to some degree, but my blogs don't have a significant page rank and still I'm amazed how easily I outrank much larger sites and often times also tour operator websites. All I can bring to the table besides from text and nice photography is passion... Not that the big guys were not passionate (I used to work for tour operator websites myself), but they have to deal with much larger sites with content from different and complex sources. Hence my little boutique style venture beats them easily so far on selected keywords ;-)
You're on to something for sure. The page you cite is a great example.
Now I'm tempted to experiement with some content, with no effort to follow any SEO standards, dispite my intincts.
The question remains, "if this is the case, then how does Google determine authenticity and passion?" If Google is in fact doing this then they are the next Simon for American [web wrtier].
Thanks again Rand!
Nice post Rand.
We too felt the heat on one domain. It seems to be Panda3 just 12 days ago. Keep up the good work.
:-)
I agree with your findings. I think how often your homepage changes or how often you post a new article/blog would matter. Those are signals of passion.
In the search to rank 'quality content' higher, it seems to me that people will find sites that are passionate, interesting, content-rich etc of a more high quality than boring pages about the same topic. Such pages will create a 'buzz' (no pilfering intended big-G) because they're just great and informative.
I mean, which is likely to influence people's decision to do that walk? A list of stuff along the sea front, or someone's positive experience - and I would presume the latter.
In terms of SEO for businesses, I'd say passion matters a lot. To be honest there's no point ranking highly if people come to your site only to be bored stiff. People want to know that what you do is not just a job, but a passion, a desire to assist, whatever is driving you.
And it's something that's either there or its not - hidden inside people. You can't convince a complete introvert to get out there and be overtly passionate. So it's not about optimising, but about being authentic, IMHO.
Your name confuses me greatly.
Thank you Rand!
Every now and then I start to wonder about my own judgement when I feel myself following one of these search engine mysteries down a path that doesn't seem to have anyone else on it...
Makes me feel so much better when someone who really has a finger on the pulse turns out to be on that path!
I have been watching SERPs and toying with page changes for a few weeks, based on what I've started referring to as the "reality scale". Having decided that there seems to be one, I've been trying to work out exactly how you could assess this with an algorithm. You've done a much better job of that than I could hope to, but there are two other things that I have noticed seem to correlate.
I'll be waiting for more on this one with anticipation!
Great points - interestingly, this very post qualifies for both points.
Great post as this time there are no "hard facts" which (for me) is more like real life that Google is trying to imitate. I love them numbers ;-) but I agree: Google does try to get something into the equation we called "fuzzy logic" once upon a time.
I think adding some magic salt in form of quality raters into the heavily link-biased SERP-soup is nothing but good and Google has started doing that. With results like the one above Google is surely testing this new breed of algorithm and wants to see how users (clickwise) react to it. I guess the rest of the SERP is just the same as it ever was but this little piece of website shows the interest of Google to do it right (sometimes).
OK, enough of this - I have to get back to work and help improve some sites to deliver real help to searchers, not only another useless keyword-optimized page ;-).
What a wonderful thought, great article.
Immagine SERPs packed full of passionate and unique content, makes me feel all warm and fuzzy inside
Rand - I'm too excited to read all the way through before I post... we were arguing about this 'feeling' in the office this very morning! Particularly the feeling that "The result feels like it has no SEO whatsoever, often not even a focus on keyword targeting or on-page work. It almost seems to rank in spite of itself, or the lack of knowledge the author/creator has about the rankings process"
Right, I'm going to read the rest, but just wanted to let you know you'd hit us Monkeys right in the zeitgeist.
Intriguing post...and , yes, I appreciate your diverging off your usual, data-intensive, action-packed trail -- for a moment. ;-)
I appreciate Dave Ashworth comment on the outbound link profile of the blog post as well as Dan Almond's pt on Goog's potential use of corps linguistics.
And since we're on the conjecture plane, it makes me wonder if Google is field-studying the linking behavior of SEO-naiive communiites (can those be found anymore? Remote villages of Tanzania?) Consider scientists. As a (former) scientist, I was trained to reference aka "link" in my papers all the works that influenced my research. Of course i wanted people to read those to understand my own work. So when I learned in blogging about the no follow attribute, I thought "how useful to distinguish links only referenced as bad examples" (so i dont improve their page rank). But i was very disappointed to learn no follow was necessary for good SEO overall.
At least for me, this an example where the SEO metalayer interferes with good content thinking (and that means simple community linking) for the author. This alongside where GOOG may find patent evidence of substantial SEO tampering-- makes me wonder if Google may be exploring to what extent overly good SEO may be negatively correlated with authentic content.
I tried an experiment on Tineye.com to see if any of the images were replicated throughtout the web or potentially hot-linked to. I found nothing of significance. Almost every image was not found anywhere else on the web.
I am too stymied as to why this would rank, but I have to say is it a great search result. Good job GOOG search engineers.
One thought we can't test is that blogger has some internal time on site/engagement metrics that get fed into the algo. I actually rarely see blogger sites rank well, but perhaps the metrics on this post indicate passion : )
SERPS are still a mystery in many respects, and this post (and comments) are clear indicators this is the case. It will be really interesting to tease out what on-page factors the algo is looking at post Panda, to 'derive' a non-optimized page... if this is even the case.
I buy it Rand. Nice find! I often scratch my head wondering why is Google showing stuff from 3 years ago when I Google a very current relavant topic. Like recently I was looking for a fix to a problem I was having with Drupal. The top results where 3 years old! I will be watching SERPS with a new eye for myself and my clients thanks to this post. Not to mention, making some recommendations on content development startegies. ;-)
I've seen this age problem regularly, especially while working on Wordpress problems.
Why am I getting these old results when the info I am searching for needs to be the most recent available?
This is a refreshing info, but one would really think how to make a content look really natural, less ads, keywords. Well, that's the challenge!
I have to laugh at the criticism of the post for being insufficiently rigorous. One way to headline some of the reaction would be:
Good Site Gets Good Results;
SEOs Despair, Wonder If Their Lives Have Meaning
Okay, I exaggerate for dramatic effect. But you get the point.
Sometimes you have to look beyond the numbers and conventional thinking to get to the truth. There is clearly something going on and Rand is clearly on to something big here.
And, like many others, I have seen the same thing.
One of my clients has achieved much greater success than he "deserves." His site includes five blogs, all by people who are passionate about the topic and often embed photos and videos. The site also knocks it out of the park on all six of the factors Rand mentions.
Sigh, story of my life, forever do I see websites that SHOULDN'T be ranking high for the search term but still manage to outrank websites that seem to be doing everything down to the book. Makes me wonder whether websites such as your example rank well because they are linked to from websites the right way (getting links from websites with doing anything) rather than hunting for places to get links in. Obviously there's more to it than just that, but honestly Google, why do you torment us so?
Personally I really hope that this it true as it gives hope to smaller, personal sites that people make having a chance to rank against all the corporate, financed or link building sites that are becoming more dominant within rankings.
Anything that suggest "the little guy" will still have a chance of getting traffic to their site is great in my mind as with the way that things are moving with social signals, personalised searched etc it will becoming increasing difficult for start-ups, especially non-profits, from standing a chance.
Thanks Rand, I think this is going to give me the inspirational push to finally go ahead with a projoect I've been kicking around in my head for a few years.
;o)
btw, the idea of optimizing for authenticity and passion scares the crap out of me...
Can't honestly say I've noticed this phenomenon per se, but it does make complete sense to me. I wonder if this could be an indication that user data is having more of an impact on search?
In this particular example, I would want to read a more personal account of a lovely walk than see a map that doesn't give me a sense of what the walk will actually look/sound/smell/feel like.. If anyone else feels the same, then I'd expect to see low bounce rates etc etc for this page..
Also, tying in with Cyrus Shepard's SEOMoz post on great blog design recently, I know I'm more willing to spend time on a blog with stunning imagery. Just those first two gorgeous photos in your screen grab have me hooked - and I'm sure others will feel the same. Maybe I'm wrong, but these stunning images seem to be more commonly found on personal blogs where the author has a passion for the subject than on any corporate blog.
Assuming that authenticity can be a factor, it can also be abused. Can you "fake" authenticity? That's the question of the day.
Google has repeatedly stated that content that is relevant to users has a great probability of ranking well. Though this doesn't always ring true, this looks like a great example of how one individual with a passion can still rank in google. It's not all about technical merit anymore - people's thoughts, opinions, and desires within the offline realm now play a role within search.
Interesting stuff.
yeah I like the Post
Thank you very much.
Dear MozFolk,
I'm replying to a bunch of you all at once. I'm from outside the industry, a cognitive science type, but this is the stuff that has me fascinated by SEO.
Lots of thoughts--I'll be concise.
1. Panda
2. Passion vs Science
3. Behavioural Research
Let's be clear. We know that Panda revolves around a questionnaire with personal ratings. Fine. The winning pages are given over to machine learning which then has to predict whether an unrated page is similar or different to the rated winners.
Ergo there must already be scalar metrics. The maths must be tractable. Passion (let's call it that for now) is measurably distinguishable, which is not saying that Google can measure passion. Replicating the questionnaire is one thing. If however you ask "What is the machine learning algo measuring?" and hence "What is measurable in user engagement?", then we're having fun.
Attention and awareness studies do exactly this all the time, but to catch up with Google it could take concerted research to pick out typically attractive pics, vids, fonts, colours and UI arrangements (which will be dependent on goal and demographic contexts). All very worth doing, and all in addition to familiar SEO metrics, but here's something we can look at now.
Text. Writing style. How many personal pronouns per paragraph etc are all very quick to measure.It is entirely feasible to use a bank of text analysis metrics to define post hoc what styles are rated most 'pleasing' given different classes of search (finding a restaurant vs finding a mortgage).
Have a look at this: https://iwl.me/ . The code is open and free to all. Something like this can be used to measure the difference between your site and the one that (should not have) kicked it out of position. I'd bet there are correlations between new improbable winners of the same search class. And it's something your copywriters can optimise for given a clear, evidence led brief.
In other news there is a trend afoot (in the UK) towards things that appear Lo-Fi. It follows and might be seen as a transformation of an attraction to 'local' feel brands with 'no artificial colouring'. That's been around for a while.
If it is the case that the same is active now in text preferences we can assume this is also a current fashion, however honestly we like it and romanticise the little guy (which I do too). A new "write this way" rule may only be half useful. Turn the question into a scalar metric and we can track changes, giving people exactly what they most want to see.
I should probably get involved and write a blog too. I haven't got into that yet...
All the best, GW
This replies to interesting comments by: jeremywebb, Noisy Little Monkey, EGOL, CriticalMassAgency, Pete Foster, Fiveblocks, PlasticCards, Daniel Freedman, QnQ, Walter.Schaerer, AnthonyYoung, pixelshots, nwhite1, RyBacorn, happysus, Josh-u-a, website designer, conquerapathy, and of course... the inimitable randfish.
I take it back. Forget https://iwl.me/
These two taken together should give more than enough data points for factor analysis.
https://www.usingenglish.com/resources/text-statistics.php
https://liwc.net/tryonline.php
If there is anything to the idea that "linguistic authenticity" or "genuine personal voice" has a correlation with one or two simple markers that Google can treat preferentially, this is where I would look to find them.
GW
It all comes back to creating content that is useful for the user and not the search engines which Google is trying to push. When writing any content for a site its so hard to get away from making sure it has certain phrases and words in it though.
Someone writing a personal blog, will be more authentic about their subject.
Interesting post... I truly believe websites that try, try and try again are the kind of sites that Google can’t help but like! I mean quality content posted on a regular basis just rocks, it shows dedication and a passion to succeed… Some good food for thought here! Thanks for sharing :)
I agree that there's something in this. I've speculated that passionate-sounding phrases such as the one here including the word "glorious" may be playing a part. We know Google factors in complaints about a site - so why not positive sentiment too, certainly on pages that link and/or mention a site, but perhaps on the site itself in some circumstances?
I also agree about connectedness and the real world. I suspect Google uses sites that contain reliable address data to help identify a real-world presence.
Authentic, active social and professional networks could help indicate an important website or brand: lots of social connections and mentions on sites like Linkedin, Twitter and of course Google+.
In the case of sites like Twitter, importance can be guaged in real time through current trends.
This theory goes hand in hand with google pushing quality content. After reading this I noticed yesterday that the first two results for my query "fishing in dirty water" have no links to the page and limited links to their respecive domains compared to the rest of the results which all have links to both the ranking page and far more authoritative domains.
Interesting post that actually makes me feel warm inside.
Whatever the alorithm behind it is, it does not appear to be implemented in Germany, so it might only work in the US for now. I just did a number of queries that would lend themselves to personal sites run by passionate people. Unfortunately, I get forums, well-known SEO optimised sites and major players you would expect (sport centers, hotels, city tourist information etc.) and absolutely no blogs.
Maybe I was just unlucky or this has not been rolled out over here, yet.
Good article Rand. The differences in the page authority numbers are astonishing. I can't help but wonder if there are links with apt anchor text that Google found in some corner of the web, which somehow didn't get picked up by the mozbot, but I certainly hope you're right.
I have to say that I feel the same about the SERP in Google. I get a feeling that "something is wrong". When it comes to nisches with huge competition such as insurances and similar - I can feel that the SERP don't really reflect the "actual typical SEO-frontpage". I mean, in a competetive nische like "insurances", almost every website on the top-10 in the SERP has an "F" on the frontpage.
I too agree Rand. After Panda and Google+, Google must have added some authenticity metrics in their algorithm and I also can see a trend that links from social media sites get priority in SERP. For example few days back we have submitted an article in different sites and tweeted a published link .Now when I searched the Article title in Google, twitter link appears on 2nd position in SERP.
I definitely think you're on to something. I have a blog that I've done zero marketing/seo work for. It does really well in search results and I always wondered why. Sure I think it's a fabulous site, but again I've done nothing with it yet (the site itself is being developed and the blog is just to get things going until launch). It could be other factors, but I definitely think what you're saying plays a part. Just google "sparkle uggs"...
Hey Rand,
great post, thanks for picking up this topic, even if it may be a little 'fluffy'. A think part of the reason for the ranking boost is a combination of a higher emphasis on CTR and users becoming more savvy and getting wary of over-optimized sites. Add that to data from other sources (maps, LinkedIn, etc.) and search results will better reflect authentic content...
Cheers,
Chris
I was thinking that thr SERPs results ware being influenced by my preferences. Items Ive posted on Facebook rank highly when I look for them but not when a coleague searches on their PC.
The force is strong with this one - I think I can "feel it" too.
It is not easy to create a reputed image at Gogole witout knowing the protocols. One cannot get benefits until he/she doesn't know the nature of Google.
Great Post! I have noticed sites similar to this ranking high in the SERPs lately as well. I am also curious as to how Google is measuring offline presence in the real world. Only time will tell! Thanks again for the post.
They seem to be testing out the AdWords at the bottom of the results as well...
seen that only one or twice not sure if it was browser specific... wasn't using my PC at the time...
Article about it on SE Land today, seems to be an interesting change to SERP layouts.
That's where I first heard it and then it appeared on my results so I was impressed. I personally hate it though - it's god damn ugly.
haven't had the misfortune of experiencing adwords ads at the bottom yet!
Nobody knows - it might be browser specific - just another trial :)
I have been thinking a lot about what you are saying in your post, I think people need to look more closely at all the small changes Google have been doing and add the pieces to the puzzle, you also need to work on your own methods.
I have been testing a bunch of things on various blogs and websites too see what makes users more happy with the content on my sites, some times you really need to put in the work, even when you do not have the time =(
But I agree with the blogspot style blogs really kicking off, not only as google owns the netork but also becuase people spend more time making just one blog, not 1000s affiliate sites hehe =)
Really content is king, you just need to mix it up with all the SEO factors, all the social factors and every thing else, I do not think this is a bad post at all like some have said I think it just is a post to get people thinking and get your minds running wild about how your could further develop SEO strategy into the next 12 months...
I think that the basic SEO information is more available today for everyone than ever before and everyone trying to optimise for those little things like title, h1, meta tags, links and the sad part that this dosent help to get better search results in quereis. Which is ultimate goal of google, they want quality content and not optimization or spam.
They slowly moving towards new ways to rank a website... the previous factors that were crucialy important before is just a tear drop in the ocean. I strongly belive that new update is comming soon that will kill a lot of spam, and move higher quality content. It will become much harder to rank for certain words. Thats why google keep saying make quality content for users!
From our personal ecommerce website we see alot of ranking improvements where we added unique and quality content that nobody have. There is one more project we are working on right now that should be finished soon, will confirm or deny this version. I will share this story as soon as we done.
Interesting post indeed. So a site that has no real link profile, no obvious on-page SEO or domain authority, and yet ranks.
Heres one for conspiracy theorists: Sites Owned By Google Employees and friends of Google Employees :)
Great post, Rand. I hope this continues and that informative, unique content that may have very low link popularity can obtain quality rankings.
I too am seeing more unique results in the SERPs, similar to your example. While I just said I am glad to see this, I think Google needs to fine tune this; many times I get forum / discussion search results which provide absolutely no value. It's usually a question I may have searched for (SEO related or not) and frequently I get a top result from a forum that poses the same question and either a) has no answer whatsoever or b) has a handful of useless/wrong answers that follow.
Anybody with me here?
Anyhow, I see your point and enjoyed the post!
I feel like I am just pretty much cloning what others have said but put simply yes the alogrythm changes and ranking factors are always evolving and changing (especially trust factors) but it is a hard thing to prove or even figure out fully when something new comes into it especially if it may only be a minor factor.
How ever I do look forward to seeing what else you find further in this area.
Great post Rand. We have been seeing the same type of thing on some of our searches as well. I think this is a combination of a couple factors (among many).
1. The Panda Update removing much of the content farm/spam sites that lacked this "passion/authenticity" is allowing the other articles that are written by people who have a passion for a niche (and not an SEO based motivation) to rise into the rankings again.
2. I think passion and authenticity is also a real world social metric that represents value. If we look at what being "social" is about, it's those things that bring out an emotional response (most of which have a feeling of passion behind them) that people find valuable and authentic. Maybe Google is surfacing articles that have a passion/authenticity behind them to represent more of a "real world experience" (in the search results) of how 1 individual might socially express their passion or present content to another person.
Anything that adds greater diversity to the search results has to be good from a user perspective. Although if thhis is a sign that the focus is shifting either further towards quality content then organisations who are currently performing well in the SERPS but lack the resources to produce really in-depth quality content will suffer.
Ghost in the machine! Who better to discover it than the Captain America of SEO himself?
but srsly though...good post!
Hey Rand -
I think you've got something going here. I seem to recall someone from a search engine (maybe Matt Cutts?) talking about how they want to show many different kinds of content to users, because not everyone is looking for the same kind of information and thus results of all the same type would not provide the best user experience.
I've started looking for this more. I did a query on "New York food" today (using pws=0) and found a site at the bottom of the first page called "NYC Food guy", which is a personal blog. It has a decent number of links (337 to the full domain), but it shows on the first page alongside sites such as Yelp, which has 96,000+ linking RDs. There is also a Food Tour site (foodsofny) that has around 120 linking RDs and is just below the local results, and is outranking Yelp. Also, you should probably think about taking Everywhereist on this next time you guys are in town.
Cheers!
How it works?
Great stuff THX ^^
Working on different websites, I have measured that sometimes it happens that Google is now giving more priority to the trusted blogs where we place our content than the website we are actually trying to rank for. In some cases it results the content out-ranking your target website. Rand, I want to know that what kind of thoughts will pop-up in your mind when handling a case of out-ranked blog than the target website which is welll optimized? I believe that this could be the effect of the recent algorithm change by Google.
The rankings are most affected by domain relevance in the case because each ranking site has not optimized (really) for the non competitve KW. So you have a combination of on page content factors coupled with overall domain authority and relevnce. The robertwadephoto... blogspot is a domain (really subdomain) that ins highly relavent to seattle - then writes a post that includes some of the keyphrase in the post title and wallah - it ranks - where is the mystery - a strong relavent domain with a relevent title and content ranking for a non competitive keyphrase. Am I crazy or are you making a mystery out of something so obvious its a joke! The other rankings are also relevent in url/title/content to some degree - (which is enough for any non competitve longtail) and all reside on strong domains - virtualtourist, meetup, a .gov
Come on guys there is no mystery here
Just to add more perspective ... search the keyphrase "Seattle Waterfront" which is competitve and you will see that "conventional seo" domain authority + url + onpage + links is running the show. when you querry the long tail (with the word "walk") you get a serp dominated by domain relevance + authority combined with the mention of "walk" - if any one of the pages ranking for "seattle waterfront" added the word walk in the title, discription, or url it would rank above all the ranking domains that are currently showing up for this long tail search
I think passion and authenticity just boils down to noteworthy content. LOL you definitely called it on what would happen if you post an example.
I agree. I wrote about this recently having noticed some really interesting things happening with changes to content alone, and new sites ranking really well for competitive terms with no link profile. https://j.mp/oOpOTz
I absolutely agree with QnQs post. This site and this article is authentic and I am happy that Rand and many others notice that websites which are made by real people who like blogging, posting and this kind of "art".
You said this wasn't the perfect example but take a look at the keywords you entered. "Waterfront walk" is in the title of the site - exactly how you entered it. There is a difference to all other sites that did not have the phrase in their titles. In google.de this blogpost is ranked as #1 and if you change the order of the three keywords other sites will appear on the first rankings. So this was probably only luck. What do you mean?
Argh this is confusing x_x ... although i have to said I am 75% agree with everything you said, but it is impossible to agree completely since we dont even know if perhaps this is REAL or just some algorithm that went haywired? (After all apart from Google works in mysterious way, i can bet my ridiculous amount of wage that CURRENTLY they are experimenting many things to try to find the best possible algorithm , *cough*panda*cough*)
After reading this post, the first thing that came to my mind was that phrase from John Searle: "this is the kind of stuff that gives bullsh@!t a bad name".
This is a fine example of snake oil SEO. Don't waste your time like me reading this.
Don't be rude.
I think you've completely missed the point of the blog post.
I don't think that this post can justifiably be labelled 'bullsh!t'. Rand admits that there are no solid studies to back this up and clearly says that, at this point, it is a feeling. He also invites people to debate the point, not simply write off the post without providing their opinions.
If people didn't vocalise their hunches and discuss their initial thoughts on imperfect science, nothing would ever get done and we'd all be sitting here wondering what SEO is and whether computers will ever be invented.
Personally I'm not an SEO expert, but I work with SEO on a daily basis and am gradually learning the finer points. I think that Rand raises some fine ideas and, whilst solid examples may be thin on the ground, it definitely seems that something good is happening under the Google hood. For example, our rankings for very competitive keywords have crept up quite significantly during recent weeks (we're in the travel industry - one of the most competitive industries on the Internet). In some cases, we've jumped from page 4 to page 1 in under two weeks.
What have we done? Expanded our content. That's all.
In the long term we have link-building strategies planned, but at the moment our focus on creating more content that is written well, rather than being littered with keywords that ruin the flow of a paragraph, seems to be working. How? I don't know, but that's why we keep on working and investigating...
I'll have to spend some time thinking more about this and how it might impact the direction I take my SEO team.
LDA Scores of the first four results...
#1 89% #2 50% #3 46% #4 37%
I think that when there is no "popular" answer to a query (ie: no strong link signals like exact match anchor text), Google will rely (either de facto or intentionally) on myriad relevance factors and increased QDD
Google sends out employes to check out offline advertisments. They check for example posters. Thats why offline presence work. I realy would like to know why the remember function of the login doesn't work. I have to give in each time my username and password, in order to login to Seomoz.
Hi Rand,
I found several cases like yours while auditing sites... and it was on Google.it. I underline this because, at first, someone could think that it could be a side effect of the Panda Factor action... but Panda is still not alive in Italy, at least not officially.
Anyway, yes, I confirm your gut sensation, as I too have seen "ooparts" websites in the SERPs and usually with the characterstics you described, even though not so frequently.
Therefore, I cannot say that there is an "authencity" factor in the Google's algo, even though it something that has its logic, if you look at the evolution of the SERPs themself, as if Google is really trying to fullfill its native purpose of showing just useful content created with people in mind and not bots.
Just a brief note, as maybe I was not able to make me understand.
This post is all about "gut" sensations... Rand have a feeling, and from what it seems also others (me included) have noticed that kind of website ranking when they should not accordingly to the "rules".
I (and Rand) are not saying that it is a real fact. Personally I believe that they could be somehow "the exceptions that confirm the rules".
Feelings are not certainly science, but science has to thanks a lot those "feelings"... as they usually are what lead to the scientific tests: or just ask to Newton and his apple :)
very scary what you are saying .. "Panda is still not alive in Italy, at least not officially". Some of my sites have gone from page 1 to page 3 and others the opposite. Something must have happened .. for sure
I know... I saw a couple of clients' site with the same ups and downs, but it is not still Panda: 1) google has not officially announced panda for not English languages and Googles (something it would surely do); 2) Google seemed hitting more on link base factors more than on page and content ones; the prove is that so many thin content sites and farms are still ranking very well.
Anyway, if my sense of timing is good, in Italy (or Spain) we should have to wait Panda around the 4th quarter of this years, ASAP it has solved the problematics of the Latin based languages. Therefore people still have time to correct their faulty sites.
Great work.
A deep analytics only can give you this kind of perfect projection about google and other's serp.They are frequently change and we have to watch on it constantly to see the serp changes.
I have seen the same thing in similair search queries, but figured it was a result of lack of competition. If some businesses with strong SEO knowledge wanted to rank for "Seattle waterfront walk" I'm sure they could pretty easily and those sites with "passion" would be sent to page two. Nevertheless, there is only one way for the search engines to improve and this is it, so it may only be a matter of time.