My band's website is the highest ranked page for the search term "red blue yellow".
No meta headers, no keywords, no <strong>, no <h1>... nothing, not even <html> or <body> tags. In fact, the only HTML is a <pre> tag containing ASCII art and a link to our Facebook page. I mean this quite literally, view the source.
However, it has been linked to from other sites quite frequently in recent weeks.
It would seem that Google doesn't penalize invalid HTML, or even pages that have only the most basic HTML.
You have to remember Google is inflating these numbers for their own gain - being increased PPC spend, of course.
Who in their right mind would search for "red yellow blue"?
I'm curious, does anyone have any idea how that content ranks compared to good old fashioned mark-up? Is it 1:1? Is it harder to rank with flash content? I really have no idea.
Seriously though, despite how anecdotal this page is, it gave me some food for thought. Does Google really care about how far in the future I have registered my domains? I'd love a source on that.
* Spammers tend to have tons of crap sites, so they have less money to spend on registering all of their URLs for a long time.
* "Good site owners" tend to have few high quality sites, so they can afford to spend more on registering their domains for longer.
Thus, you would probably want to use the time-until-URL-expiration as a "ranking factor" while sorting results on search pages.
I've updated the post with a link to that article. Thanks for the inquiry.
Thanks for the post. It's one of the better summaries of SEO practices around.
It's based on a survey of SEO professionals/experts, which leaves a bit to be desired, but I still think the conclusions are on point.
To wildly hypothesize, what if length-of-registration tends to indicate more-beloved results in most .COM domains, but has no impact on .ORG and .GOV domains, and actually indicates less-beloved results in .COM domains that consist of generic common words (those loved by professional domainers who then lengthen their registrations strategically)? A learning system could discover these conditional relationships over time -- but they'd resist easy explanation by a employee summarizing factors via informal channels.
The Google gave, and the Google hath taken away.
I honestly think that they do not really use this signal though, and if they do, it's so far down in their algorithm that most searches will never use it. I've had domains that are only registered for 1 year that rank just fine.
