Today I do some researches on Google to find an internet marketing forum to promote my ebooks and I used the same keyword to find one and pretty strange when this site “Webmaster Sun” is getting top #1 on Google and I have a look on their site, they just have 8,924 posts while other forums are bigger and having millions of posts.
Can you guys please show me an analytic on SEO aspects about this site, what techniques are they applying for their site to get better rankings so that I can apply for my blogs.
To the best of my knowledge, Google don’t rank by site, or its size, they do it per page. If they judge that a particular page provides better quality content than another, then that will be the one higher up their result listing.
As Chris mentioned, Google ranks pages, not sites.
Also, just having more pages / posts doesn’t mean a better ranking than a site without.
The reasons could be many fold
WebMasterSun’s ranking pages could be
faster, more trusted, have an older domain name with a longer registration period, have better quality content, more incoming links, better social media sharing, integration and backlinks
The possibilities are almost endless. You just need to Google “higher rankings on Google” and almost any post will give you reasons why WMS could be ranking better.
Short information but very exact and I have to agree with you, I will keep this to make each my blog post best as possible.
Agreed.
You are mentioning to better social media sharing, I am seeing webmastersun is getting more shares, twitter followers, and Facebook likes. Are they helping to increase rankings for them? are social signals a ranking factor? if so, I can need to consider to improve social engagements for my blog pages & posts.
What I notice is the first two pages in the results have the exact three words searched for in their page title. So exact that they are a simple substring match.
The third isn’t a forum at all, but a blog. The page title and URL, though not as exact as the first two, has the same words searched for in the same sequence.
The last has the same words searched for in the same sequence in its page title.
To me it looks like the “magic formula” is to have the words people will be searching for in your page titles.
In the left column it says “Verbatim”. Same results without that?
This has been discussed in the forum before.
I don’t believe that social shares/likes do affect actual ranking with regard to search engines. Although some correlation between ranking and social popularity has been observed. I would put this correlation down to quality of content. Google favours quality content, and real people “like” and will engage with and share quality content. Social can also be a useful medium to spread awareness of your site too. So even if it does not affect SE rankings, it can still be worthwhile for gaining traffic.
