SEO Competition: And the Winner Is…
The SEO Contest between ON Site and OFF Site SEO is finally over!
For the very last time, a quick recap: one month ago Oscar Carreras wrote an interesting post on his blog claiming that off page techniques counts a massive 75% in terms of ranking factors. I didn’t agree and I challenged Oscar in this funky SEO contest: he tried to rank as high as possible for the keyword Davide Corradi using only OFF site SEO techniques, while I was trying to rank as high as possible for the keyword Oscar Carreras using only ON site SEO techniques.
After one long month of intensive spamming link building from on side and extreme On Site Optimisation from the other, Ladies and Gentlemen, the winner is…
The final Ranking Report:
The keyword “Oscar Carreras” on www.seobloom.com
- google.com: 1st page, position 5th (no change)
- google.co.uk: 1st page position 6th (was 5th, lost one position)
- google.co.uk pages from uk: 1st page position 3th (despite the site is hosted in Italy) (was 5th, gained two positions. This week only 1 out of 6 images in the images result are showing my pretty face. They were 2 out of 8 last week)
- yahoo UK 1st page position 3rd and th (was 2nd, lost 1 position from last week)
- yahoo.com 1st page position 5th (no change)
- bing.com Not Ranking (was 47th)
The keyword “Davide Corradi” on www.europeanseo.org
- google.com 1st page, position 7th (was 10th, gained 3 positions from last week)
- google.co.uk 1st page, position 7th (was 9th, gained 2 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 another page that can’t be considered ’cause it is slightly optimised.
- yahoo.com same as above: is not ranking with the correct page anymore but is ranking in first page with the optimised page
- bing.com not ranking (was 18th)
Ok technically me and my on site techniques won but…Shall we call it a draw? 
Contest takeways:
- Google is crawling, indexing evaluating pages at a terrific speed. It took few minutes to get indexed for both the pages and less than 24 hours to start ranking.
On page techniques are giving consistent results but the Search Engines (mainly Google) are “live creatures” keeping changing. Your competitors are changing. The people searching for your products are changing the way they are searching. Don’t stop monitoring and adjusting your site! It’s a false myth that On Site SEO is a one-off activity and once your pages are done there is nothing else you can do. Your pages are the playground where you can freely test, change and eventually improve your site performance. Work on it constantly. It will pay off.
Google.com ranking evolution
- External links are the quickest way to get your site ranking: off page activities are powerful but need to be constantly performed. Your competitors will take advantage and overtake you if you stop. Don’t.
- Google is deciding the location of a website using these 3 criteria (in order of importance):
- Google Webmaster Central Geographic target
- TLD
- Hosting Location
- Google is giving lots of weight to Social Media. But social media result are effimer: they don’t last. Still nowdays you can’t live without them. They are the quickest way to get the immediate visibility you need.
- Yahoo! gives lots of weight to On Site elements: My page it’s stable, ranking at the top of the SERP. Oscar’s link supported page disappeared when a better optimised page show up.
- No Follow links are followed. Big time. The vaste majority of the links that Oscar built (according with Yahoo Site Explorer) are no follow.
- Bing: No Comment.
Conclusion
On Page and Off Page SEO should play together. I reckon that as a ranking factor in Google Links count a good 60-65%. On Site Optimisation 35-40%. Social Media is something completely different. They boost your visibility not your ranking. Yet. These percentage may vary considerably: depending on the industry, the competitiveness of a certain keyword and the quality of a link, OFF Site factors may count up to 75%.
Conclusion #2
hire both me and Oscar!
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Congrats!! You won fair and square. I owe you a dinner.
Really interesting article. I always wanted to do this test myself and am pleased to see that on-page seo is still so very necessary.