Top Google Results without SEO

Gary Eckstein Search Engine Optimization 1 , , , , , ,

One of the Sites I manage sells Blu-ray Movies and Blu-ray Players. There is a lot of competition for the search term ‘Blu-ray’ with tens of millions of results being returned on the SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages). I have started doing some SEO on the site to try to improve where the site appears in the SERPs. Whilst analyzing where the site appears in the SERPs I came across http://bluraysucks.com/ which features as result number 19 on Google for the search term ‘Blu-ray’.

Considering that Google returns 142 million results for a ‘Blu-ray’ search, appearing at number 19 is a very good result. I therefore decided to look at what SEO is being performed to get such a fantastic SERP result. Here are a few items I discovered about http://bluraysucks.com/ in relation to SEO:

-                      Description and Keyword meta tags exist and are descriptive.

-                      Robots.txt allows all bots.

-                      No Sitemap.xml file evident.

-                      No ‘nofollow’ on hyperlinks (very nice!).

-                      There’s no ‘title’ text for the hyperlinks.

-                      There are 1001 comments relating to the home page.

-                      Home page last updated November 2006.

-                      916 external Websites/Pages linking to http://bluraysucks.com/ (some high and some low PageRank links).

-                      Google PageRank = 0 (WTF!!!).

-                      Alex Rank = 2,773,598.

-                      An Archived German Wikipedia page links to the site.

O.k, so some SEO basics are being done well however many of what would generally be considered basics in order to get a good SERP placement are non-existent; A Google PageRank of ‘0’ is the lowest PageRank possible, the home page hasn’t been updated in nearly three years, there isn’t a Sitemap.xml or sitemap available etc.

So, SEO isn’t everything (although all the other high ranking sites for the Search term ‘Blu-ray’ that I analyzed have done some hefty SEO work). Well done to ‘Some Guy’ from http://bluraysucks.com/. Your SERP result is outstanding!