July 18, 2007  10:18 am 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“.

13 Comments »

  1. Rather impressive. It’s obviously mostly the trust thing.

    Comment by Eli — July 21, 2007 @ 5:05 am

  2. 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?

    Comment by Bas van den Beld — July 22, 2007 @ 11:09 pm

  3. 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

    Comment by Wiep — July 23, 2007 @ 8:54 pm

  4. [...] a post about. A friend of mine Wiep did this with Matt Cutts by placing a link with the text buy cheap viagra online to Matts post on cheap viagra spam. And now i am pulling the same joke on [...]

    Pingback by XsLinx » Blog Archive » The perfect page for men — July 27, 2007 @ 2:42 pm

  5. [...] a post about. A friend of mine Wiep did this with Matt Cutts by placing a link with the text buy cheap viagra online to Matts post on cheap viagra spam. And now i am pulling the same joke on [...]

    Pingback by XsLinx » Blog Archive » The ingredients of the perfect Stumbleupon page — July 27, 2007 @ 2:50 pm

  6. [...] would seem Google places quite a bit of ranking power behind “trusted” domains. For example, Matt Cutts, who works for Google, runs an internet marketing blog and decided to [...]

    Pingback by Trust in Google | Best Rank Blog — July 30, 2007 @ 7:27 am

  7. This is a very interesting topic. Sounds very similar to link bombing.

    Comment by New To SEO — July 30, 2007 @ 8:51 pm

  8. 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.

    Comment by Beguinners Guide to SEO — July 30, 2007 @ 9:52 pm

  9. Good points, shame about the punctuation. Keywords does not need an apostrophe, who do they belong to? Damn I’m such a pedant.

    Comment by Andrew — July 30, 2007 @ 11:55 pm

  10. 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!

    Comment by Manish — August 2, 2007 @ 6:16 pm

  11. well, the “viagra” story has not end yet, i saw onemanblogs did it again, when will be my turn?

    Comment by jalse — August 18, 2007 @ 6:07 pm

  12. [...] Google can’t manage to clean up [Buy cheap viagra] let’s do it ourselves. Go seek a somewhat trusted search blog mentioning “buy cheap viagra” somewhere in the [...]

    Pingback by Buying cheap viagra algorithmically — August 21, 2007 @ 3:26 pm

  13. [...] Links go to the main domain that you’re trying to rank, which is key given the importance Google places on authoritative domains. [...]

    Pingback by Business Blogs: Should I Blog On The Company Domain or a New Domain? | SEO ROI Services. Need an SEO Rockstar? Contact Us. Prices $3K-$10K/mo — July 9, 2008 @ 4:39 am

RSS feed for comments on this post. TrackBack URL

Leave a comment



Posted in Link Building, SEO by Wiep