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A friend of mine recently noted that search engines are strange beasts, and it can be difficult to rank for keywords. He wanted to know why certain stories got ahead of others. Was it content? Was it links? What was controlling where things rank…especially in Google?

To answer some of these questions, I’ve decided to do an analysis on a currently popular search phrase: “Amy Fisher Sex Tape” without the quotes (a non-exact phrase search, since most users don’t use exact phrase search).

Lately, there has been increased buzz online about the possible release of an Amy Fisher Sex Tape, something brought to my attention by the same friend. I really didn’t know what to expect. This is something I wouldn’t normally search for. (no, really…seriously…please believe me)

Before we get into the analysis, who the hell is Amy Fisher anyway? Well this little blurb from Wikipedia sums her up nicely:

Amy Elizabeth Fisher (born August 21, 1974), dubbed the “Long Island Lolita” by the press, is an American woman convicted of the 1992 shooting of the wife of her lover, with whom she began an affair as a 16 year-old student at Kennedy High School in Bellmore, New York. Fisher served seven years in prison for aggravated assault, and was released in 1999. The case drew a great deal of media attention, and Fisher has become a writer since that time.

So now on to the analysis.

Keywords in URL

Out of the top seven sites listed by Google’s search of Amy Fisher Sex Tape, only four had all of the words in their URL. The Rad Report, The Hollywood Gossip, PopCrunch, and NS4W. These sites rank third, fifth, sixth and seventh respectively. The first and second sites listed by Google don’t include all of the keywords.

Keywords in the Title

Interestingly, two of the top 10 results in Google’s SERPS do not contain an exact phrase match on “Amy Fisher Sex Tape” - in fact, the number one result is missing the phrase, as is the NY Post article. This seems to point to the fact that there are other, seemingly more important, factors involved in SERP rankings. This is not to diminish the importance of Title keywords…but it is to point to the fact that strong SERP positioning can be had without exact keyword matching in the title.

Content

So my first thought was that whichever site had the most content and subtly stuffed it full of Amy Fisher Sex Tape keywords would be the top result in all the search engines.

The first site, Crime library, brought up by Google’s US search included the word “Amy”, seventeen times, but “sex” was only used four times, and “tape” five times. The second site, Tim Worstall Tabloid Edition, had “fisher” fourteen times, “sex” ten times, and “tape” nine times.

This already disproves, for me, that keyword density in the content is the sole reason for the ranking of the sites. It might not even be all that high in how Google ranks a site, though it still should be a given to optimize in such a way.

I checked out the rest of the top seven sites for the search term, and found that some sites had next to no real article, just a series of pictures, while others had long articles, and very few relevant images.

Position / Site / Word Count
1.) Crime Library (693)
2.) Tim Worstall Tabloid Edition (251)
4.) New York Post (447)
6.) PopCrunch (37)

As you can see from the above table, word count might help you boost your rankings on the search engine, but at the same time they might not really hold you back.

In fact, many SEO experts believe that there is a thin content penalty, and shorter articles won’t usually rank well. If that is really the case, then how did PopCrunch get to the sixth spot with only 37 words? Could there be other factors at play to push sites up, or pull them down?

Google PageRank

Naturally, we all assume that the higher the Google PageRank a site has, the better it will rank, so it didn’t surprise me that Crime library with its PageRank 7 ranked first on the list. What was surprising though is that the New Your Post, while also having a PageRank of 7 sat in fourth place in the listings. Finding itself beaten by PR5 and PR6 sites. Also interesting to note is the PR3 Popcrunch beating out the PR4 NS4W.

Can we learn anything from this then? Well, it seems that site PageRank isn’t the main factor in deciding where things come up when searching for various terms, but it seems that having PageRank on a relevant article can push you to the top. The article about Amy Fisher on Crime library has a PageRank of 3, while all other sites listed don’t have any PageRank on the article page.

Could that be the golden star you need to get pushed to the top? If so, then how are all the PR 0 pages following it being sorted?

Age of the Page

While it might be tempting to say that the Crime Library article ranks higher because it has been assigned a PageRank, a more accurate analysis might simply be that the page is older. In fact, the number one result from Crime Library isn’t even really about the Amy Fisher sex tape. It’s a page that was created long before the rumors of a sex tape emerged.

Perhaps, in this case, Google’s weighting the SERPS heavily towards age plus authority? What does this tell us? Well, I think it shows that age can often be a negative indicator of relevancy for recent news searches.

Popularity of the Page

So maybe popularity has something to do with it? Is it the popularity of the site, or the backlinks to the article that helps Google judge what content is important, and what isn’t?

Crime library’s article has eleven back links from eleven sites. The Rad Report’s has 60 from four sites. The New York Post has 789 links from twenty-nine sites (the best link portfolio of the bunch), and PopCrunch has 291 links from seven sites. Not only does Crime library have close to the least number of links in the sites we are taking our data from, but the links that it does have appear to be mostly from spammy looking sites. So the number of links you have aimed at the post, as well as the number of sites those links are coming from don’t instantly result in higher rankings in Google.

So what about other systems for judging site popularity? Could Alexa or Technorati give us a clue on how things will rank?

Position / Site / Alexa / Technorati
1.) Crime library / 12,183 / No Technorati
2.) Tim Worstall / 114,918 / 10,029
3.) The Rad Report / 61,213 / 28,099
4.) New York Post / 2,268 / 16,059
6.) PopCrunch / 15,590 / 2,775

As you can see, as with almost all of the pieces of data so far, there are discrepancies on how things rank. Alexa is well known to not be the most precise system for finding out how popular a site is, but usually if you are comparing sites in the same niche, it is pretty good as a comparison tool. This time though we have a site with a rank of less than three thousand behind three other sites in Google. We have a site with a fairly low rank of nearly one hundred and fifteen thousand sitting second on Google.

Technorati wasn’t much better in figuring out where the sites should rank as the sixth site, PopCrunch outranks the rest, and is sitting sixth according to Google. Again, Technorati isn’t even close to perfect, but should things be so out of whack in other measuring services? Does this tell us anything useful about Google and how a sites popularity will relate to its position in the rankings?

Various Search Engines

So then I went to see what the other search engines had to say. Google might be the biggest, but they aren’t the only one online, and what I found was rather interesting. I did the same search for Amy Fisher sex tape on Ask.com, Yahoo.com and Live.com and only one of the original results from Google appeared in the first page of the other sites, and that’s the New York Post article. It appeared in the number one spot on Live.com, Microsoft’s search engine.

Oddly enough, PopCrunch also made an appearance, at the bottom of Ask’s first page, but not for one of the Amy Fisher articles on the site, but instead for their post entitled, Amy Winehouse Escapes Rehab For American Tour. Seems Google is not the only search engine a little confused when it comes to this story, though admittedly Google’s results are at least about Amy Fisher.

Surprises

There were three big surprises in this analysis. The first was that New York Post ranked fourth behind sites that in pretty much every way, shouldn’t be above the New York Post. The site has a great Google PageRank, it has a great Alexa rank, the article length was reasonable, and the back links included some great sites including Fox News, Gothamist, and the Drudge Retort. So what is holding it back from getting higher on the list?

Well, it doesn’t have all the keywords in its URL and it didn’t have one of the best keyword densities, but other than that, it looks great. Much stronger than the number one result.

The second big surprise was that Google placed an outdated and irrelevant page as the number one SERP result. Clearly this is a case of Google emphasizing age over other factors. Age works for some niches, but not for celebrity news. And the result that gets returned should be a little embarrassing for the people at Google.

The third big surprise has to do with the PopCrunch result. The site has no less than five articles relating to the Amy Fisher Sex Tape and each of the posts have all the keywords in their title.

The Posts: oldest to newest

Why did Google take their second oldest post on the subject, and make it a front page worthy post, when others had more text, are more recent, and should probably be considered more relevant? Understanding the reason for Google’s decision on this issue would go a long way towards pwning the SERPS for other high-volume searches.

Tips and Lessons Learned

While nothing absolutely conclusive comes from this analysis of the major contributing factors to ranking high on Google, there are some great lessons we can learn from all of this.

Age Matters - There’s simply no question about this. Looking at the number one result leaves no doubt about the importance of age.

PageRank of Article Pages are Important - If you have many pages that get a Google PageRank, they will be more likely to rank well than those that have no PageRank. If your pages don’t have a rank, then Google moves on to other contributing factors to decide your position. This doesn’t mean that if you have a high PageRank on your main site that you will rank well in a bunch of keywords as sites with lower index page rank may have more pages with a ranking and beat you in search engine results positions. The important thing is to make sure that the internal pages of your site get a nice distribution of PageRank.

More Content Doesn’t Equal Higher Rank - Just because your article has thousands of words, loaded with keyword density, it doesn’t mean that Google will rank it higher. You can have the longest article in the world, but without taking into account other search engine optimization techniques, you won’t get to the first page.

Google is Still Smarter - While the first article was old, and not what I was looking for, most of the other results on the first page were right on target. Over on Ask, Yahoo, and Live, I found myself with almost as many results that weren’t about the Amy Fisher Sex Tape as I did results that were relevant.

I will admit though, seeing the New York Post article rank first on Microsoft’s Live Search does give me some hope for it, as I think that is where the article belongs.

Hosted Sites Still Rank High - I don’t know how I feel about sites hosted on TypePad and WordPress.com, but I almost feel that if they aren’t spending the money to get their own domain, and/or host their own content, that they shouldn’t rank as high as those of us that do spend the time and money. A Typepad blog was ranked second, and a Blogspot blog was on the first page, and I wonder if this positively effects their search engine position at all. In my view, there should actually be a dampening effect on hosted sites to encourage the elegance and aesthetic qualities of a stand alone domain.

More Traffic Doesn’t Mean Higher Rank - Getting tens of thousands of page views and not ranking very well for search terms? It doesn’t look like the two are necessarily correlated. Just because you are getting more traffic, doesn’t mean that Google gives every individual article preferential treatment.

More Information is Needed - If you have more thoughts about why certain sites rank higher than others, not covered in this article, please feel free to comment below with any information you think would be relevant. Search engines are an ever evolving beast with little verified information out there for the common blogger on getting things ranked well.

How do you rank for keywords?

Update: Of course Google’s SERPS change every day, and so when I checked out the search term today, I got different results. Also, you will have received different results depending on your location in the world. Go figure…

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