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Overview

The Search Engine Optimization contest run by the V7n networks started on January 15th, 2006, with the announcement of the contest words “v7ndotcom elursrebmem”. In all three major search engines, Google, MSN, and Yahoo, the contest words did not show any results in the Search Engine Response Pages (SERPs). The contest, however, was only concerned with ranking a webpage at the top of Google’s results. As I mentioned earlier this week, the contest ended May 15th.

With some initial controversy between two Search Engine Optimization camps, V7N and Greg Boser (aka. Webgeurilla), the potential winnings for the contest grew. When the final totals were registered the prizes totaled $10,000 and an I-Pod, which was enough to draw lots of webmasters to the contest.

The controversy and large winnings brought in more press and more contestants that any previous Search Engine Optimization (SEO) contest. At the end of the contest, Google had indexed 4,500,000 pages, Yahoo had 2,910,000 entries, and MSN indexing only 85,718. In contrast the largest contest predecessor, Nigritude Ultramarine, only topped 2 million in Google by the end of the contest.

A charity page that was assisted by Blizzard Internet Marketing as well as many others, only performed white hat, (Google approved) tactics and did not use a large collection of personally owned directory sites. The charity team did use link exchanges in the last two weeks of the contest when the benefit was fairly negligible. Finishing in the top five, and managing to help raise over $5,000 for Celiac Disease research, the charity site is a perfect case study for search engine optimization.

Lessons Learned

A number of SEO concepts were either learned or validated during the contest. These include issues like Google Bowling, on-page optimization, and varying link text, as outlined below. More importantly, however, many things were discovered about how Google indexes and crawls websites.

Google Bowling

As reported in an earlier article, Google Bowling V7ndotcom Elursrebmem, we revealed that Google Bowling is a real concept and can happen to even well intentioned sites. Google Bowling happens when a site builds links very quickly and ends up triggering a response from Google that normally involves either removal from the index or a drop in placement in searches. The most important thing to note is that it can be recovered from; in the case of the charity site the recovery occurred fairly quickly.

On-Page Optimization

The concept of on-page optimization is not a new one. The SEO community has long known that balancing the factors on a web page is very important; this contest proved just how important.

• Title Tags

A page’s title tags can greatly affect where a page appears in searches. The title tag of the charity site changed a number of times throughout the contest. Each change was followed by either a rise or fall in the page’s ranking. When the contest words were the only item in the title, the page saw its quickest clime. When the title was changed to one meant to draw in potential links, the site’s ranking fell, proving that the title tag can control, at least to a small extent, a site’s overall performance.

• Header tags

The charity site again proved that header tags, mainly the H1 tag, can play a crucial roll in the overall performance of a site. Header tags are a way to tell the search engines and users where one section ends and another starts. The H1 tag generally appears once on a page, at the top, to underscore the title of the page.

The H1 tag on the page was changed on a semi regular basis with the words “V7ndotcom Elursrebmem for Celiac Charity” holding the spot for the majority of the time. Again, the page saw a modest increase in its rankings when the H1 tag was changed to only the contest keywords.

• Keyword Density

A fairly nebulous concept to most, keyword density measures the percentage of times that a keyword or set of keywords appears on a page, compared to the total amount of text. This generally takes into account the header tags, title tags, link text, and in some cases, the meta information that is not generally seen by users.

The charity site averaged between 2% and 3% keyword density. This means that the contest keywords appeared two or three times out of every 100 words on the page. Other sites had percentages as high as eight to ten, which is generally so high that most consider it “keyword stuffing”, or over using a keyword in hopes of getting better rankings. Keyword stuffing is something that Google watches and occasionally punishes sites for.

Most thought, before the contest, that going higher than 5% would bring a punishment by Google. This contest proved, however, that going as high as 10% can be done with a certain degree of safety. This does not mean, however, that it should be done. Over use of keywords could chase users away from a site, contradicting the reason that the site wanted high rankings in the first place. Maintaining that 2% to 3% density on the charity site shows us that sites do not need to keyword stuff in order to achieve high rankings.

Off-Page Optimization

Optimizing off-page is a considerably more difficult proposition. A site owner can control his or her own site, but not others. The most important factors to watch for are getting appropriate link text and links from related pages.

In this contest, however, getting links from related pages proved difficult. Most related pages were competing in the contest and did not want to link to other competing sites. For this reason, the key was getting as many links as possible from different websites and using keywords in the link text. Varying the link text is key to a site’s survival.

• Varying Link Text

One common practice to help a site obtain high rankings is to get as many backlinks as possible. One of the ways that Google decides what a site is about is by evaluating the text someone uses to link to a site. In this case, the majority of the links needed to use the contest words to link to the site.

When the charity site got Google Bowled, one strategy used to help it get back into the top ten was to change some of the link text on its incoming links. While most of the links still used the contest keywords, some were changed slightly to include only one of the keywords along with other text.

Google’s Behavior

This contest corresponded with a Google page rank update and the roll out of the Big Daddy data centers. The contest highlighted the changes that occurred and the recent instability in Google’s indexing. The contest ranking fluctuated daily and in some cases changed in less than five minutes. We learned some things about Google’s spidering, caching, and updating (particularly of the title tag and description in the SERPs), despite the instability.

• Spidering Patterns

Google’s spider, known as the Googlebot, is what Google uses to “see” a site. All search engines use spiders in similar ways. The spider comes to a site, looks at the text, links, meta information, and almost everything on a site. Data retrieved by the spider creates Google’s index of webpages.

In looking at the server log files for the charity site, it becomes apparent that Google felt the page was of high importance. The spider visited the page regularly, usually around ten times in a day. When Google’s spider visits a page this often, it means that the search engine feels the page is important and that the content changes often enough that it wants to make sure it has the freshest data to use in results.

• Caching the Page

The cache of a page is a copy of the page that some search engines pull into their databases. This copy is a way for users to look at a site without actually visiting the site, and way for webmasters and optimizers to see what Google is seeing.

The main thing that was proven by Google’s cache is that pages are not cached, or at least the cached versions are not displayed in search results every time the site is spidered. On average, Google’s cache changed every two days, or roughly every twenty times the spider visited the site. This tells us that the while the spider visits the site regularly, Google still has a delay in how quickly it tells the world about any changes it finds.

Titles and Descriptions

Title tags and page descriptions are sometimes pulled from meta information on a page. Occasionally, Google uses a description from another site like DMOZ.com, or even from somewhere on the page itself. The title and description are used in the Google SERPs as the blue link text and the website description below it. These two things can vastly change the number of visitors to a site, as they are the first thing a potential visitor sees when seeing search results.

After the charity site changed its title tags, Google took as little as two days, and as long as a week, to display these changes. Keep in mind that the site was being spidered very often, more than most sites are. This means that Google’s displayed index was being changed every 20 to 70 times the site was spidered. This does not mean that it always takes that many spiderings to see change for every other page, but the more important Google feels a site is, the quicker these factors change.

Conclusion

The contest did not reveal much new information; however, it did confirm some previously unconfirmed ideas that SEO’s had. It also showed that some things that were thought to be incredibly important, like low keyword density, are not as important as some believe.

The one area worth exploring is the spidering-to-caching ratio. This could reveal part of the Google algorithm and let SEO’s look into how often the index is updated. This information could tell us how the Big Daddy update has really changed the way Google looks at sites - something SEO’s have been trying to find out since Google first was released it for public consumption.

Josh Green - Blizzard Internet Marketing, Inc.

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