I just got an email last week from the “Market Samurai” guys with an intriguing subject line:

“The Irrefutable Truth About Google’s Biggest Bias”

Wow!  I follow Search Engine Optimization quite a bit, it’s my business, so needless to say I was ready to hear the latest evidence… irrefutable no less…

(sigh)  I should have known better.  There are VERY few sources on the interweb that provide actual proven, apples to apples tested information.  After reading their post, the Market Samurai guys are either purposefully lying or clearly have no clue how the Google search engine algorithm really works.  I actually think it’s a little of both, but mostly the latter.

Here’s the gist of what they were saying — that Google really values keywords in the domain name, so much so that it can overpower what has been traditionally thought of as important, links back to a page.  The example they use is for the phrase “credit cards” in google.  They also have a chart with data from a tool they sell and they find an interesting effect:  Big corporate domains like Visa.com and MasterCard.com are ranking lower than CreditCards.com even though they have 10-100x more back links.

Looks good at first glance, except the whole premise of what they are looking at is wrong.  The correlation and causation all mixed up.  Yes, there certainly appears to be a correlation between the the keywords in the domain name and rankings, but the chart is incomplete.

As much as I hate educating my competition, here goes…

There are 3 factors that make up the overwhelming score of how a website ranks:

1. What is in the html title tag
2. Total number of links to that specific page (in Google they add some weighting and call it PageRank)
3. What those links say.  That is, the link text in the links, aka. known as Page Reputation

That’s it.  That alone is 85% or more of where a website ranks.  A distant forth is the keyword in the domain name or the file name.  That keyword in the domain or file name, by the way, is one of the core factors improving “page reputation” (aka. link text).  I’m forced to wonder how much of the search engine bump you get is caused by the keywords in domain name (causation), and how much of the ranking bump is caused by improved page reputation since every link to that page, no matter how someone does the link, will always pass some page reputation (correlation).

The effect is the same, using keywords in your domain can help your rankings, but understanding the why makes a difference.  Don’t get me wrong, whether it’s the cause or a correlation, getting a domain with keywords can be helpful.  It’s just not the only reason you should have for picking a domain name.

So, back to the Market Samurai example – they showed that Visa.com overwhelming has more links back to their page, but are beat out by a site with close to 100x more links.

What if the HTML Page Title Tag was most important?  When we look at the first few results now we can see how the big boys don’t even use the term “credit card” in the title tag.

Website	Page Rank	Links to Page	HTML Page Title
creditcards.com	6	9890	Credit Cards – Compare Credit Card Offers at CreditCards.com
visa.com	8	915,000	Visa USA | More People Go with Visa
mastercard.com	7	3,270,000	Welcome to MasterCard Worldwide
americanexpress.com	7	601,000	American Express Credit Cards, Rewards, Travel & Business Services
discovercard.com	7	507,000	Discover Credit Cards : Cash Back Credit Cards, Rewards Card, Travel Credit Card
creditcardguide.com	6	2,510	The Best Credit Cards – Compare Credit Card Offers and Apply at CreditCardGuide.com
citicards.com	6	2,420	Credit Cards from Citi Cards | Compare and Apply Online

To add to the “lack of mystery”, if you look at  the Visa and MasterCard pages, not only do they NOT have the phrase “Credit Cards” in the title tag (as seen above), they don’t even have it anywhere on the page!  The fact is, with the complete lack of information on the pages, it’s to google’s credit that they can even decipher that Visa and MasterCard have anything to do with credit cards.  This linking (pagerank) and reading link text (page reputation) is the core reason that Google search results are so good.

I am missing one important column above – Page Reputation – what percentage of the links have “credit cards” in the link text.   My tool for measuring page reputation  just when on the fritz, but for CreditCards.com,  87%  of the links had the phrase “credit cards” in them.  For Visa.com, 80% of all the links were images (you know, that visa image), 16% had the term “visa” in them, only 1% even had the term “card” in them, and only 0.3% even had “credit” in them.  Because they have almost a million links back to their page Google was able to figure it out.  MasterCard & DiscoverCard.com is similar to Visa, so even though they have a good title tag, their page-reputation is lacking.

So, how could the Market Samurai guys, who’s business is selling SEO/Search Engine Marketing research tools, miss something as important as HTML Title Tags (let alone ignoring page reputation)?  Is it because they just launched a new tool to help you research and find domain names?    Again, I think partially yes — they really wanted keywords in domains to be overwhelmingly  important, so read into the data exactly what they wanted to see.    Having watched a couple of the videos, the domain research information isn’t necessarily bad, but you have to wonder if they misunderstand Google so much, what else are they getting wrong?

Your thoughts?

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Cheers,
Kelly
Beaverton Web Design

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