The SEO Files

Search Engine Optimisation

SERPs Analaysis

Position
The obvious and most important factor, where did the site rank in Google.co.uk on May 16th 2006 @ 12:00 GMT. This is what we are all trying to emulate, well done to www.v7ndotcomelursrebmem.net.

Date of frist Registartion
The date the site was first registered is an indicator as to how old the domain is and howlong it has been around. This does not neccessarily mean that this is when it entered Google's index or if the domain has been offline for any period.

The results for this field are probably a bit confused as this wa a recently started competition and many of hte sites were registered recently for this specific competition. Also it should be noted that age and the sandbox probably don't cause much of an issue for this non commerical keyword. From looking at the results it is not an especialy important factor.

Domain Age
This is taken from the first entry on www.archive.org's Wayback Machine web archive.

Domain History
The domain history notes if the site has been constantly online and updated or if there are breaks in its history. Some of the new sites in this competition do not have any history. They have a value of 0 for their domain history.

Domain registration length
Domain registration length is one of the most debated areas in the SEO industry at present. It is speculated that the lenght of domain registration effets the SERPs position.

Keywords in the domain name
Having the keywords in the URL has long been a favourite with anyone optimising a web site. It is easy to see why. If you were going to write a page about cars you might well call it cars.php.

It stands to reason. This filed looks at how many times the keyword appears in the domain name only. 4 out of the top ten are using the keyword in the domain name. This represents 40% of the sites.

It is important to note that positions 1 and 2 both have the keyword in the domain name. This is a significant factor here by these results although I think it will have much less of an impact for more comercial search terms.

Keywords in the URL
This is similar to the previous field although it looks at the whole URL including the file name. It is notable that 8 out of the 10 sites use the keyword in the URL. This is an important and recognised factor.

Title Keyword Density
The title is one of the most important aspects of on page optimisation. Why would you call your page about cars anything different to Cars. Again, it stands to reason.

This field looks at the keyword density in the title. All of the sites have high title keyword density. 4 out of the ten sites using the keyword soley as the title.

Google description keyword density
This is something that hasn't had much attention paid to it. Google helps us out by highlighting the keywords in the SERPs.

It is fair to assume that the areas highlighted are of some significance. As the keywords in the description google uses (NOT the meta description tag) are highlighted the density of the keywords within Google's own SERPs description is calculated.

On page keyword density of all text
This is the density of the keywords in the page of all of the text. - On page link keyword density The keyword density within hyperlinks internal and external is calculated.

Number of links to the absolute URL of the page
An old trick which could be considered slightly black hat or spammy was to link to the smae page or the top level domain with an absolute URL.

This still appears as an external link in the back links. The number of links to the absolute URL are listed

% of links on the page to the absolute URL
This looks at the perecentage of the links on the page that are absolute URLs.

Google Back Links
Googles link: command is often debated. Sometime ago Google started showing only a selection of a sites back links. For a while it showed only PR4+ sites. Now I think its just a fairly random selection.

The amount of back links and quality of back links still seems to play a large part as expected. A more in depth look at all of the back links will be taken in due course.

Yahoo Back Links
Yahoo's backlinks give a more reasonable picture.

MSN Back Links
MSN's backlinks give a more reasonable picture.

Google Site: command, how many pages in index
How many pages Google has in its index for each site. The amount of pages a site held was seen to be a large factor in the ranking algorithm.

This stood to reason that the more pages the more information and the more likely a user will find what they are looking for. From analysing these results this does note seem to be the case.

The #1 site has 11 pages listed whilts the #3 spot has 13400. It should be noted that the site in position 3 is not relevant to the search term so many of these pages are not related. Position 7 has only 1 page indexed in Google's index.

XML Site Map
There is a common myth that using Google's XML sitemap technology magicaly gets all your pages indexed and gets you ranking much higher. Due to this myth I included it as a factor to look at.

On Topic specific site or generals ite with sub page or directory (subdomain an oddball)
Some of the sites are new sites that are specificaly targeted at the search term.

Others are old sites with a new page or sub directory targeted at the keyword. The number 10 result is an oddball in that its an existing domain with a new subdomain. It techniclay falls under both categories but is a bit of an odd ball. I am treating it as a new on topic site.
This should help identify how important the authoity of the domain is.

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