Scott Allen, whom some of you may know from Online Business Networking contacted me recently about a recent experience in using a Weblog to achieve high Google rankings. (See Related: Case Study)
Scott lives in Houston, site of the 2004 Super Bowl. He and his friends realized that they could make money by renting their houses for Super Bowl weekend. The problem was how to promote the rentals.
They did research and found that the listing companies wanted hundreds of dollars for a listing, so he looked for other ways to promote their homes. He figured high Google search rankings would help.
To this end, he created a weblog (www.super-bowl-rentals.com), which made it very easy to update the site regularly and upload pictures, etc. Three days and $8 after starting the weblog, Scott’s site showed up at the #2 position in a Google search for “Super Bowl rentals�?. (UPDATE: See 1st comment from Scott)
There are a couple of confounding points about this success…
- Scott’s page has a Google PageRank of 0/10
- He has few incoming links (<5)
- The sites below his in the rankings have more incoming links and higher PageRank.
Scott and I tried to figure out what caused his site to get the high rankings without the benefit of the tried-and-true methods. Here’s what we came up with…
Google looked at his site and saw that it:
- Is updated more often than others
- Contains consistent keywords (Super Bowl vs. Superbowl)
- Contains higher keyword density
- Uses keyword placement more effectively (keywords as headers)
I think this goes to show that keywords can be the trump card over PageRank, in some cases.