Search Engine Optimization Studies

No, it isn't. There are Web sites that have very few links from other Web sites leading to them, yet have a PageRank of 7 or 8. This is an investigative challenge worthy of the best google rank experts.

In many cases, such as large business or online magazines and newspapers, these sites get most of their PageRank internally. These sites often have thousands of pages with most of them possessing links to the home page.

For instance, do a search for free music online in Google. Look at the 6th ranking site, link:http://www.free-music-production.de/. If you do a link check of that site, you'll see that it has no links registered in Google yet it has a PageRank of 4. At least apparently. It is said that Google doesn't report links from pages that have a PageRank of less four. Now, when I tried FAST's search engine I found an interesting site linking to www.free-music-production. That site is www.fmp-online.de.

As it turns out, the two sites are mirrors of one another and mirrors are supposed to be filtered out. The fmp-online.de site has 276 inbound links and it has a PageRank of 6 yet it doesn't rank. There are only two links leading from www.fmp-online.de to www.free-music-production.de. That means that very little PageRank is being sent to www.free-music-production.html. Yet, this site is the one that ranks.

How could this site possibly rank 6th for a competitive phrase when it has a PageRank of four, no links registered and its mirror site excluded from Google's database?

Well, I did a ping and tracert on both sites and discovered they're both residing on the same server. But could Google capture two mirrored sites on the same server and just transfer the pagerank of one site to the other with no penalty? In this case, it seems very likely. Granted, the site's had free music in the title and domain name, but I have not seen that same result on other sites with the same keyword placement.

I did a search for free online music, which is an intensely competitive keyword phrase. Overture reports that phrase is used in over 10,000 searches per month. www.free-music-production.de ranks 21st for that phrase too. it also ranks 17th for an equally competitive phrase, free music. and 3rd for music production.

The answer is found within the site. www.free-music-production.de has 890 pages indexed in Google. In most of those pages, there is a link leading to www.fmp-online.de. That would account for many of www.fmp-online.de site's links and its PageRank. Without the links from www.free-music-production.de, www.fmp-online.de would likely not have enough to qualify for a PageRank of 6. A PageRank of 6 normally requires several hundred links from other sites. In this case, it's getting most of its PageRank from one site. In most of the pages as well, there is a link leading to another page on the same site.

So now we've established that there is not enough PageRank coming in from other Web sites to www.free-music-productions.de for it to rank so highly. It seems to be generating its PageRank internally.

Each page on the site has the same title tags and the word music is prevalent in each. Each hyperlink uses an absolute url. This means that Google will see the words free music in each of the page's url. This means that each page has a reputation for free music as do the links on those pages.

Therefore, these links between the pages on the site carry very good link reputation which is somehow delivered to the home page. The linking on the site isn't good so this PageRank is not being channeled very effectively to the home page. It's good enough however to rank highly for many good keyword searches.

I hope you've enjoyed this real world study of PageRank. There's much more on this topic in the search engine writing book.

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