MaxIn my last post I made a pretty bold claim: I wrote that I was dominating page 1 of Google. It’s time I provided some proof for my claim.
On November 9, 2010, I bought a domain and set to work on it with my business partner. Content creation, SEO, article marketing, free report to download, video marketing, social bookmarking, authority tagging, all this kept us pretty busy for a good 2 weeks each.
We pushed it because we had to. Normally, we should have taken our time with these SEO strategies. But there wasn’t much time in the run up to Christmas, and our site was purely Christmas oriented as you’ll see in a moment.
Three weeks after we had started work on the site it popped up on page 1 of Google, ranking somewhere between positions 5 and 8. It also did a bit of a Google dance but not much.
Two weeks later it had moved up towards the top and stayed there in the run up to and over Christmas.
Here is a screen shot:
As you can see, 108 million sites competed for the broad search term on December 28.
TopTenChristmasPresents.org occupied positions 2, 3, 4, and 5 of the organic rankings on Google. It did do pretty well on Yahoo and Bing, too. 🙂
(At the time of writing this blog post, the situation had changed slightly:
“Only” 71.7 million competing sites and our site occupied positions 1 thru 4 on page 1 of Google. Our strategy works. Alas, it’s no longer Christmas.)
A word of warning, though.
However good you are at pushing your site up the rankings, the results you see will depend very much on the browser you use.
Yes, you read right. What you see is not always what is but what your browser tells you.
“Is there any other way of seeing anything online?” I hear you say. Good point. Let me clarify what I meant by my statement.
The screen shot above is from my search with Firefox. Just as an aside, before taking the screen shot I had logged out of my Google account to prevent Google from personalising the search for my account.
I entered the broad search term in the Google search box. Then I clicked through with Google Global.
You may perhaps recall an earlier post of mine, Google Global – How You Can See What Others See. Our site was optimised for the USA, and as I live in London, Google wouldn’t let me search on google.com. It always returns google.co.uk results. That’s why I use Google Global. It saves a lot of time compared to using proxy servers.
Anyhow, as I was saying, the above screen shot was Firefox and Google Global.
Here is another screen shot for you:
This one shows you the same search, under the same conditions on the same day. The only difference is that I used Chrome and Google Global.
As you can see, the result is almost the same but not quite: 108 million sites for broad search, our site ranking no. 2 on page 1. Alas, that was all. No position number 2, 3, 4, and 5 with Chrome.
What are we to make of this result?
I’d be very interested to read what you have to say. As far as I am concerned, yes, this result is interesting, and it is sort of fun to be able to say that my site dominated Google page 1. OK, I didn’t tell you initially that this was true for Firefox only. But it was true, wasn’t it?
Ultimately, though, when the chips are down, it all turns on the results the site generates. And that, alas, was not only far from what we had hoped for this site, it was very far from it, indeed, in spite of being on top of page 1 in Google, Yahoo and Bing.
This will be the topic of at least one other post.
When looking through your stats on google analytics you will see loads of people seem to use Firefox
or is it that we all just rank better in firefox!!?
who truly knows.
but top ten is good
I got some on page one in a few weeks but that was for local search sites
cheers
Hi John,
I guess in the IM niche that’s because most Internet marketers use Firefox in preference to any other browser. It would be interesting to check what’s happening when you move into “real” world browsing. I might just do that.
Cheers
Max
Hi Max,
Very enlightening post about the differences of Google search returns,
compared to our chosen keyword. Thank you for the insights.
It’s certainly is kind of baffling. Nevertheless it shows there must be a factor
intrinsic in the Google algorithm, that of purposeful variance.
Convenient or not from our angle, I venture to think it is a good thing. Why?
It may be that it is a good thing ( for Google, certainly ) to thwart the expectations of a “marketer”. Perhaps that is good for us too, in as much as not to have to be outsmarted by SEO dominant savvies.
I am happy to see Sally Neil placing a post. I have disappeared temporarily from Alex Jeffreys’ scene only due to a stupid WP mistake, such as a back up gone wrong.
See you around, Sally.
Giovanni
Hi Max,
Congratulation on your Google page one rankings. I didn’t even know that it’s possible to occupy 5 results from the same domain on the SERP and you took less than a month.
Different regions does gives different results. I didn’t know different browsers does it as well. It’s kind of strange. I’m glad to know that SEO is still working, not like what the doomsayers are preaching. It just strengthen my resolution that what I’m learning in MWA is also still working.
See you in the forum, Ciao.
Hey Max,
Good job on your part! Your effort was rewarded!
Thats pretty amazing for just 3 week time span!
“Content creation, SEO, article marketing, free report to download, video marketing, social bookmarking, authority tagging, all this kept us pretty busy for a good 2 weeks each.”
Results producing actions for sure!
Theres so many elements about SEO that you can use to tweak your website it gets pretty mind boggling and also the fact that SEO is changing everyday. Its good to keep in mind that some browsers load differently. It makes sense. Chrome seems to be much lighter and also the region like you mentioned does bring up different searches. I noticed this on eBay first when they came out with eBay international and showed different products as a result.
Question: Do you know how you can optimize your website for this?
Yoichi
Hey Max,
Well I have to say that baffled me????
How can a browser give different results, that’s plain weird!
That’s great that you got the number 1 position, at least on Firefox, so is top ten christmas presents a highly searched term? I guess it would be more seasonal though obviously?
I am not the greatest at keyword research to be honest, so if those questions are DUMB sorreeeeee ha ha.
Nice to see your still working on your online stuff, so many students have disappeared lately, glad to still have you around Max, be back over more often now I got my time etc all sorted out now.
Sally 🙂
Hi Sally,
Great to see you back here 🙂
Nope, no dumb questions. Firefox and Chrome (I don’t really use IE anymore except for checking that pages display OK) gave the same rank but Chrome only showed the highest ranking page while Firefox showed all pages that rank. Beats me why that is so, but it’s an important fact to know.
Yes, Top Ten Christmas Presents was intended as a seasonal site. Very stiff competition as you can see from the numbers, but we did it. Alas, (now I give a bit of my future posts away,… Sally, why are you doing this to me???) it is not a buyer keyword. And that says it all.
Hope to see you around more often.
Max