SEO Competition: Link Building vs On Site Optimisation – half way results
When we are exactly half way to find out who is gonna be the winner of this SEO contest an earthquake at the top of the table is threathing the so far undisputed supremacy of Oscar’s Off Page techniques!
Once again, a quick recap: two weeks ago Oscar Carreras wrote an interesting post on his blog claming that links and off page techniques counts a massive 75% in terms of ranking factors. I didn’t agree and I challenged Oscar in this bizarre SEO competition: he will try to rank as high as possible for the keyword Davide Corradi using only OFF site SEO techniques, while I’m trying to rank as high as possible for the keyword Oscar Carreras using only ON site SEO techniques.
24 th February 2010 – Third Ranking Report
I have to admit I’ve been quite busy this past week, so busy that I haven’t paid too much attention to this blog. But as you can clearly see from this week ranking report all the tweaking of the first week is finally paying off!
Oscar Carreras on www.seobloom.com
Google is recognising my target page as the most relevant for the keyword Oscar Carreras: the website is not ranking anymore with an archive page or with the home page. I guess this may be one of the reason I jumped up to the first page in all the monitored version of Google. Still ranking very high in Yahoo! where I’m loosing some positions but now I boast 2 pages in the top 10 results.
- google.com: 1st page, position 7 (was 21st, gained 14 position from last week!)
- google.co.uk: 1st page position 5 (was 15th, gained 10 position from last week!)
- google.co.uk pages from uk: 1st page position 5th (despite the site is hosted in Italy) (was 7th, gained 2 position from last week. Funny: 3 out of 7 images in the images result are showing my pretty face lol)
- yahoo UK 1st page position 3 (was 2nd, lost one position)
- yahoo.com 1st page position 7 ( was 6th, lost one position)
Davide Corradi on www.europeanseo.org
Oscar is gaining positions in Google: his site is back ranking with his target page in the first page of google and google.co.uk. We have to notice a little problem in Yahoo! where he is not ranking anymore with the target page but with the page about what he did to make my name rank.
- google.com 1st page, position 9 (was 13th, gained 4 positions from last week)
- google.co.uk 1st page, position 8 (was 13th, gained 5 positions from last week)
- google.co.uk pages from uk: not ranking (the site is hosted in US)
- yahoo UK not ranking with the correct page anymore but is ranking in first page with the slightly optimised page
- yahoo.com 2nd page position 17 (was 14 lost 3 position but is ranking in the first page with the optimised page)
Both the pages are still not indexed in Bing and this considering the quality of the pages ranking, dear Bill Gates, is quite embarassing.
Half way takeways:
Google is a “live creature”. On page techniques are taking more time to pay off but if you have a little patience they do. Off page activities need to be constantly performed. I don’t think Oscar have done any link building this week. Let see if the idea of having to pay me a dinner will push him to fight back!
Yahoo! definately gives more weight to On Site elements: Oscar’s target page is disappearing while the better optimised page is coming up.
Bing: helloooooooo! Speechless.
Next update tuesday 3rdth of March. Stay tuned…
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Umm bizarre. You need to turn off personalization Corradi!! It is clear that you have been clicking in your result for Oscar Carreras and that click through rate is skewing the results for you.
If you use a fresh installation of Chrome and an incognito window, with cookies turned off and not taking into account browsing history, your page ranks 21 in Google.com whilst I am still in position 9.
In Google.co.uk I am 8, for Davide Corradi whilst you are 6th for Oscar Carrera…that is an achievement !!!
Besides, you keep writing posts with anchor text pointing to that page, thats off page optimisation!!!! I did less than one hour of work, putting all your posts together you are getting into the 5 hours mark!!!!
Agree on Bing, it’s very slow :-/
Will be interesting to see how it develops, I am not sure you can take any conclusions from this yet as too many other factors are involved..
Carreras you are scared aren’t you? Personalisation is off and I am well placed in page 1! put your glasses on!
See the title of the post: the contest is ONSITE vs OFF SITE and internal linking is perfectly allowed on my side. I argue it is not on yours!
ps: Stop adding these
blackgray hat links using my name as a signature of your posts on this blog. I will change them without mercy…eh eh eh!Peter: I know it’s just a little meaningless experiment but I find it quite interesting