Summary: The web pages actually at
top of Google have only one thing clearly in common: good writing. The usual SEO sacred cows and bugbears, such as PageRank, frames, and JavaScript, are less important, if they even matter at all.I was recently struck by fact that top-ranking web pages on Google are consistently much better written than vast majority of what one reads on web. Yet traditional SEO wisdom has little to say about good writing. Does Google, world's wealthiest media company, really rank web pages based primarily on arcane technical criteria such as keyword density, link text, or even PageRank?
Apparently not.
Most Common Website Content Success Factors
I took a close look at Google's top five pages for five most searched-on keywords, as identified by WordTracker on June 27, 2005. Here's what I found.
The web pages that contained written content (a small but significant portion were image galleries) all shared following features:
* Updating: frequent updating of content, at least once every few weeks, and more often, once a week or more. * Spelling and grammar: few or no errors. No page had more than three misspelled words or four grammatical errors. Note: spelling and grammar errors were identified by using Microsoft Word's check feature, and then ruling out words marked as misspellings that are either proper names or new words that are simply not in dictionary. Google almost certainly has better access to new words than dictionary, with its database of billions of web pages. Supposed grammatical errors that did not in fact violate style rules were also ignored. Google would certainly be less conservative than a grammar checker in evaluating popular stylistic devices such as sentence fragments. * Paragraphs: primarily brief (1-4 sentences). Few or no long blocks of text. * Lists: both bulleted and numbered, form a large part of text. * Sentence length: mostly brief (10 words or fewer). Medium-length and long sentences are sprinkled throughout text rather than clumped together. * Contextual relevance: text contains numerous terms related to keyword, as well as stem variations of keyword. The page may contain keyword itself few times or not at all.
SEO "Do's" and "Don'ts" that Don't Really Matter
A hard look at results slaughters a number of SEO bugbears and sacred cows.
* PageRank. The median PageRank was 4. One page had a PageRank of 0. (Note that low PageRank would seem to discount idea that these pages owe their ranking completely to numerous incoming links.) * Frames. The top two web pages listed for most searched-on keyword employ frames. * JavaScript-formatted internal links. Most of websites use JavaScript for their internal page links. * Keyword optimization. Except for two pages, keyword optimization was conspicuous by its absence. In more than half web pages, keyword did not appear more than three times, meaning a very low density. Many of pages did not contain keyword at all. * Sub-headings. On most pages, sub-headings were either absent or in form of images rather than text. * Links: Most of web pages contained ten or more links; many contain over 30, in defiance of SEO bugbears about "link popularity bleeding." Moreover, nearly all pages contained a significant number of non-relevant links. On many pages, non-relevant links outnumbered relevant ones. * Text content: a significant number of pages contained little or no text. These pages were almost all image galleries (there was one Flash movie), with images being photographs of subject covered by keyword. Originality: a significant number of pages contained content copied from other websites. In all cases, content was professionally written content apparently distributed on a free-reprint basis. Note: reprint content did not consist of content feeds. However, no website consisted solely of free- reprint content. There was always at least a significant portion of original content, usually majority of page.
