Rand got me all excited with his post. I've been tracking down the French vertical of "web design / website design" theme of keywords for the last 12 months. This vertical is very similar to the English one. As an example, if you wanted to score well for Web Design in English on Google.com, you would try to hit, in the long term, the best keywords, like:
Web design
Website design
Web site design
etc. (+ mispelled, plural, etc.)
For French, we have the same kind of situation... You would have to hit keywords like:
Conception site
Conception web
Conception site web
Conception site internet
etc. (+ mispelled, plural, etc.)
I've been looking at the results for quite a while, and I was a little bit surprised to see how many SERPs manipulation I've seen in the top20 for most of those keywords... Here's some examples:
#1 result for "Conception site internet" (and #1 on most other keywords too): www.groupe-media.com. The homepage source is a black hat dream page. I've never seen a page so jammed with suspicious manipulation! To top it off, the company have multiple 100% duplicated sites (like: www.inexmedia.com) on which they rank for other keywords... Identical design, same spamming, different keywords.
#11 & #18 results for "Conception site internet" (and ranked well for most other keywords too): www.conceptiondesiteinternet.com is a doorway page linking to www.click-zone.com. And guess what? Look at this:
www.click-zone.com/Fr/Realisation-de-site-Web.asp
www.click-zone.com/Fr/Creation-de-site-Web.asp
www.click-zone.com/Fr/Conception-de-site-web.asp
www.click-zone.com/Fr/Creation-de-site-Internet.asp
www.click-zone.com/Fr/Conception-de-site-web.asp
What's wrong? The EXACT same content (layout is slightly different, they offer different layouts of their site), the same keyword stuffing, and yet Google ranks all of the 5 pages and index them well.
#13: www.reptiletech.com/ConceptionSiteInternet.html. Nice design, nice layout... but WAIT!!! why are you redirecting me after 7 seconds? Is it because you wanted to cheat the spiders so you can wait until they finish downloading the page before doing the redirection? Strangely enough, you get redirected to https://www.reptiletech.com/html/accueil.php?lang=fr. Another dirty trick to fool the search engine spiders.
This was just my 2 cents to show that Google has increased it's control over spamming, but it is still easy to fool them. I've aware of 3 different companies / seo consultants who filled a complaint about www.groupe-media.com of the SERPs in the past 6 months about its spamming and manipulation of Google SERPs and have seen no action / changes from Google.
Salut Guillaume
Some of my hints:
It's true there is still a lot of spamming as in the case of groupe media and the like. Quite frustrating to say the least.
One part of my analysis, maybe I'm wrong, is that some "anti-spam" solutions implemented in Google's search results, take some time before they "migrate" in the "non-english" language regional results of Google: (french, spanish, italian, etc.)
My advice: be patient.
Guillaume, did you test: - creation site web - creation web - web agency These are also expressions used in France
Also, on what interface did you test your keywords? Did you use the French interface ? (hl=fr) Did you limit your queries to French results only (pages francophones) I'm asking this because I do not see the companies you mention. They are all from Quebec and I mostly see French companies in the top 10 results on those queries.
Hey Kilroy. I used www.google.com... I agree that various testings (french on google.ca, direct on google.fr, french on google.fr and direct on google.ca will deliver other results, but google.com tells me a generic idea of how I'm scoring through most of those French Google (.be also and others). Basically, what matters to me is google.com and google.ca since many people in North America use google.ca or google.com (even if they force a redirect on google.ca when you type in google.com when you're in Canada)
"Création site web" and "Création web" and also "création site internet" = we are on the first page of Google and yeah, we're looking at those but not as much because I've noticed that French from France use more "Création" and French from Quebec use more "Conception" as a generic term.
And it's normal French are mainly there since France = 25 times more people / firms than in Quebec :D
Ok, that's clear now. I did not understand why you got these results. Searching on Google.ca or .com provides similar results.
SEO for web agencies is quite a new thing here in France. Most of the companies that rank on the aforementioned expressions are small ones. The large agencies mostly have websites designed with Flash, Popups and other niceties that prevent them from ranking on anything but their name.
Yeah I know, I got 2 customers in France and it is ridiculous: PPC are at 0,05 - 0,10$ / average, like 10x cheaper than here, most SEO are using tactics that are old fashioned, and the biggest brands do not care. The only company that is doing a great job at SEO is BRIOURDE INTERNET; they score first on the keyword "Référencement" (translation of SEO in French). Those guys have hounds of links and huge platforms... but guess what... I'm going after them in a couple months ;)
Bookworm: Invite me! I have heard of this but haven't been to any yet!
And yes, NVI has been competing for those words with white hat techniques since 9 months now... and I want to be 1st legitally speaking, so I get somehow upset when low-skill cheating is used and still work.
P.S. I'm not saying black hat is bad, just saying abuse of search engine can be frustrating sometimes ;)
In one keyword I'm optimizing for the #1 and #2 are pure keyword spamming with internal links... I've complained lots of times (even on Matt Cutts weblog, with that Jagger update) and guess what... They are still ranking, one of them with lots of hidden stuffed keywords and some scraped content from SERPs...
Ok here are my two cents (euro cents please) Leave the on page SEO out and take a look at the backlinks Google Just two backlinks BUT from Universities Of course Google doesn't count all the backlinks, so let's take a lool at Yahoo Less than 300 backlinks for a competitive (I suspect) phrase. But a few more .edu links
Matt Cutts says that .edu .gov links are not any different than any other links. Some people claim that a DMOZ listing doesn't affect the SERPs so much. From what I see the complete oposite is the truth now. I see .edu .gov and dmoz influence the SERPs more than ever (at least in my niches)