At #1 With Negative Effort, This company seems to have done absolutely everything wrong, but ranks Options

[bjornjohansen]

When searching in Google for the word «reklamebyrå» (Norwegian for «advertising agency») the website for Try (http://www.try.no/) shows up first. Try is one of the most known advertising agencies in Norway, so the result is perfectly relevant. My question is this: How on earth does Google know that? The website seems to have done every blunder possible:

1. The website is done in 100% Flash, inserted by JavaScript. Google have not indexed the flash file (checked for by searching for «site:www.try.no»). There is no alternative content available.

2. The title-tag contains the website’s address

3. There is not a single possible relevant word in the entire HTML file. There is actually nothing there except the phrase «Javascript must be enabled to view Flash movie» inside a noscript element.

4. There is not even meta description or meta keywords in use

5. The website has PageRank 3

6. The website has almost no inbound links – checked for by searching for «link:www.try.no» and the website address itself as the former is inaccurate: «www.try.no». I also tried the latter in combination with the keyword.

Having studied SEO for the past two years I simply can not understand how Google possibly knows that Try is a «reklamebyrå». Does anybody else do?

[Voytec]

Hej og velkommen!

I would suggest two things:
- backlinks - try this tool http://www.webuildpages.com/neat-o/ and check what's in the anchor texts. Furthermore, I can imagine that if they are well known advertising agency there would be quite a lot articles and write-ups linking to them with the word 'reklamebyrå' mentioned several times (even if the anchor is different Google would find it relevant).
- history - try to find out what was on their website years ago. Domain history is very important for Google. Let's say they had 'reklamebyrå' in their title tag for 2 years ages before, Google would still take that into account and all they need to keep ranking well is few quality links.

These are only my assumptions, though

[saschaeh]

Welcome to Cre8!

for me they are no: 1

http://www.google.co.za/search?hl=en&s...earch&meta=

your right google does not pick up any backlinks. I am at a complete loss and my post is to share your curiosity!


sascha

This post has been edited by saschaeh: Nov 9 2007, 06:06 AM

[DianeV]

Google reports 1,450 results for "reklamebyr%". That's almost nothing. With a few links and a decent history ...

[Adrian]

And you can't rely on Google's backlinks showing anything like all the links they know about
Yahoo suggests there are about 130 backlinks. With that little competition, that could well be enough, especially with some decent link text....

Afterthought

Ah, hang on, got a problem with characters there
But still, searching for reklamebyrå (not % on the end ) only comes up with about 50k results, which is still pretty low.

[bjornjohansen]

Thanks for the replies and welcomes

The backlink tool is really neat, Voytec. It provided some useful answers. It found 57 backlinks where 18 included the text «reklamebyrå» in the anchor text itself. Several other pages included the keyword other places on the page, and a few links comes from high-cred sites (though the linking page itself has low PR).

According to The Wayback Machine the current page has existed since Nov 05 2005, the history goes back to Apr 10 2001, but gives no useful information other than that.

I still find it very strange that this site ranks as #1.

It seems like the only SEO tip you should focus on is: Get backlinks with the keyword in the anchor text. The rest of the initiatives is something you could do whenever you have extra time.

BTW: If you search for «reklamebyrå» in Norwegian (add the param hl=no in google) you get 416k results instead of 50k.

This post has been edited by bjornjohansen: Nov 9 2007, 06:41 AM

[Voytec]

It's over 400.000 in fact (using google.no) and it is purely commercial phrase, so I can imagine it's pretty competitive. We can't compare Norwegian search results (5million native speakers) with English results (400million native speakers + 1.5billion non native speakers), can we?

[Adrian]

It seems like the only SEO tip you should focus on is: Get backlinks with the keyword in the anchor text.

Well that is certainly a big part of the SEO process these days.

[JohnMu]

I put together a blog post about a different site -- only this one really has no SEO , but it ranks #1: http://johnmu.com/untitled-document/ (admittedly it's a whole different situation, but it's still interesting)

I love it when local businesses get a push!

John

[swainzy]

Voytec or anyone,
I have a question about that neat tool - is the order of backlinks important? Does the first backlink mean that that site "weighs" more? Your talking to a novice so excuse this dumb question.
Thanks,
Donna

[Voytec]

Donna,
I don't think this tool would display the links in any particular order. The only way I know, to get a list like that, is using linkdomain: in Yahoo. It would be helpful but not enough for SEO purposes. I am afraid that the only good tool to separate good links from less important ones, when doing your link building, is your own judgment and intuition

[swainzy]

Thanks

[randfish]

301s - it's how smart SEOs hide their backlinks profiles