Few days ago, I saw a Google result which seems to have ranked non-algorithmically. The result came up when I searched AIR on Google.co.in. Let me also clear that the results are filtered by GeoLocation, so you might not see the same results from your location. And that’s why I have put a screenshot displaying the Google Results.
As you can see in the above screenshot, the first result is of All India Radio. Nothing wrong because All India Radio is usually abbreviated as AIR. But, how do Google Algorithm know this?
- The term AIR is not in the Title of the page
- Not present in the body of the Home Page
Also, the term AIR is used extensively in following contexts
- Adobe AIR
- Atmospheric Air
- Airways/Airlines
A lot of competition for the term, which makes it even more interesting.
The only thing which may have caused it to rank #1 could be the inbound links. The homepage has some ~3000 inbound links as seen from Yahoo! Site Explorer and there’s no way I could analyse the anchor texts of those links. I randomly checked some 10 links, and none was linking with the term "AIR", but that was just random, the full results could be totally different from my test cases and test results.
Conclusion:
1. Google sometimes give rank to some sites manually.
OR
2. The search term need not necessarily present on the page for getting ranked for that term. Perhaps Google is doing good in Latent Semantic Indexing.
P.S. You may wonder why I was searching for AIR. Actually I am learning Adobe AIR and trying to develop some simple but cool applications. Will update you more on this later.
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This cannot be treated as Manipulated result, That is .ORG domain name and it has little advantage plus its pretty old domain name plus backlinks are from various TLD.
@BlogsDNA,
1. .Org has no advantage. Why should it be given any?
2. Old domain and backlinks are good but the term AIR is something which has a lot of competition. Do you think Adobe AIR site lacks links? and is it a new domain?
.org do have advantage like .gov and .edu and New domain might be reason i haven’t seen all backlinks of allindiaradio.org website but i think it has some backlinks from india gov sites.
One backlink from .gov domain is equivalent of 1,000-5,000 PR 1 backlinks
@BlogsDNA,
Links from .gov and .edu sites don’t offer any considerable value solely because of the tlds, they have value because they:
1. Have high quality content
2. Have high quality incoming links
I really don’t think Google’s algorithms are so weak that they rank sites based on links from domains with special tlds.
I would also like to re-emphasize the fact that .Orgs don’t have any advantage over other Tlds (not even .infos).
Adobe AIR sites also have links PR9 sites (may be pr10s too) with anchor text “AIR”, that means Adobe AIR sites are optimised for the term “AIR” both onpage and offpage.
- Allindiaradio.org site has advantage of GeoLocation
- Adobe AIR sites have advantage of Optimisation
- There are also sites who use the word “AIR” in different contexts. Like wikipedia, airlines etc.
My question is - what special factor caused the AllIndiaRadio.org site to be #1. It doesn’t look like done by machines.
~Sahil
Nice observation!
I think there might be some manual intervention but not as large as thought to be ,the reason of putting top of the search page might be relevance ..
what i mean by relevance is that when a person search a keywords ,he some time know the destination but has no proper web address ,suppose I go for search air and i want to search all india radio by putting this word ,and all india radio website comes at 9-10 number and click on it as I know what i am searching ..
I think Google gives some points on the every click that person has given on search of a particular work
suppose thousand /lakhs of person has clicked all india radio link on search of [air} word though it has not been shown on top of the search result so google gives points to each click and upgrade the rank in search page for that particular link (in this case all india radio website) for a particular word search
so i think its not important that the word it self should be on the home page or in the name of the page though its most important but not conclusive
I am not SEO expert and only have one year experience of blogging
thanks