Trust + keywords + link = Good ranking (or: How Matt Cutts got ranked for “Buy Cheap Viagra”)
Let’s say you’re targeting keywords with a high competion and with an extremely high spam density. Something like “Buy cheap viagra online”. The top 10 in Google is filled with a couple of .edu’s, a .gov and a few other domains. Looks really competitive to me.
Now go out and build some Google trust. A public job at Google would be extremely suitable to let your website gain enough trust. If you’re website is trustworthy, go add “Buy cheap viagra online” about 7 times to a 9,000 words page. Make sure that the page attracts a few hundred links.
Now get someone to add a link to your webpage with the anchor text “Buy cheap viagra online”. That link doesn’t even have to be an authority link by the way, a single link from a website like this should be enough.
Oh wait, a link from this website is enough. Did you spot the “Buy cheap viagra online” link in the blogroll of this website? It’s filed under “sponsored links”. It has been there for about a week and a half, Google has cached it 4 days ago. A website that wasn’t present in the top 1000 for “Buy cheap viagra online”, is now ranking 3rd for the targeted keyword. Hey, that’s our friend Matt!
This means that it’s quite easy to get some good rankings in Google, even when you’re targeting competitive terms. All you need is three things:
1) Trust
A somewhat older website (> 2 years) with lots of links (> 10k, with at least a few hundred of high quality) is a solid foundation for good rankings. This is a really important factor, if not the most important one.
2) Keywords
Ofcourse, your website needs to mention the keyword’s your targeting. On a page with around 8,000 words, a keyword density of 0,1% should be enough.
3) A link
If you succesfully implemented 1) and 2), a single link with the right anchor text can be a trigger for Google to rank your website.
Edit: I just noticed that Matt doesn’t even need the “online”, he ranks #5 for “Buy cheap viagra“.
15 comments on this post
Rather impressive. It’s obviously mostly the trust thing.
Very nice. Did you sent this post to Danny Sullivan? He will love it on his Daily Search Cast :).
Any reactions from Google or Matt Cutts?
Bas, I didn’t. The test isn’t over yet, I’ll make sure to send him an email when I’m done ;)
And no reaction from Matt Cutts. I’m sure he’s wondering why he’s getting dozens of visitors looking for viagra all of a sudden :P
This is a very interesting topic. Sounds very similar to link bombing.
Well trust has to be built too, and that means: good content, related quality inbound links, age, number of visitors, time spent by visitors on the site, etc…
Thanks for the information.
Good points, shame about the punctuation. Keywords does not need an apostrophe, who do they belong to? Damn I’m such a pedant.
I really love this Google algo! I put up something up on my site and provide a link from here and there and there I go to the top!
well, the “viagra” story has not end yet, i saw onemanblogs did it again, when will be my turn?
It’s a hard job but someone has to do it!
Now here’s a thought… the page you are reading has those words in the title tag (albeit at the end), the H1 tag and a few times in the body. It certainly doesn’t appear to be lacking on trust… there could be some fun to be had here…
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