Known Fact, My Opinion, Or Just Plain False?

[marketershandbook.com]

Hi guys,

I just noticed while watching the rankings of one of my sites a pattern.

The website in question, is of adult nature, so at no point will I post the link or the keywords.

The number 1 ranked website for a keyword at the time wasn't very well optimized for that keyword. It had it in a few decent places, but they didn't pull out all the stops (Perhaps they didn't need to, i.e. other sites for that keyword not amazingly well optimized).

So my line of thinking was "If I do most of the sensible SEO techniques (ALL white hat, I never even dabble in black hat) i.e. keyword in title, description, h1 tag and here and there on the page where it makes sense to include the keyword, but obviously not over the top, I should easily get to number 1 and stay there until someone experienced in SEO topples me from the spot."

I know that I didn't OVER optimize the page and certainly wasn't anywhere near the spammy side of things e.g. keyword stuffing here there and everything.

However, my site was about halfway up page 2 for the keyword.

"hmmm" I thought.

So I looked at their page, and re-optimized my page to be only slightly more focussed on that keyword, than the CURRENT number 1 site (At the time).

My site jumped the next day to number 1 :)

By the way, this was on msn ONLY. This particular page hasn't been indexed by google and yahoo etc yet (As the site is only 3 weeks old).

My point is, perhaps SE's penalize sites for focussing on a keyword more than the current top site over a certainly limit.

Maybe this is to stop an individual website from doing every bit of legit SEO and gaining a high ranking right away and making it difficult for another site to break the position.

This would make it easier for other sites to compete for the top spot as they would have to get their site at a certain optimize level and when they are over taken, they must do a little more, or do it in a different way. This would keep the results moving around and perhaps even result in higher relevancy.

Thoughts?

Be gentle, it's just a theory I thought up in about 10 mins. Haven't had too much time to think about it (As in leaving for work in 5 mins :) )

Steve

[ADAM Web Design]

That's 2/3 correct. SEs penalize for focusing on a certain keyword/phrase over a density limit (otherwise we'd have sites that say keyword, keyword, keyword, keyword, keyword, keyword...) at the top of every listing.

As far as penalizing you for optimizing more than the top site in the SERPs, that would mean they would keep an ongoing record of the SERPs and their behaviour for every keyword/phrase. That would be an insane level of resource, since there's absolutely no limit to what someone could (and has) put into a search engine.

[marketershandbook.com]

would it really be that hard?

since se's can determine keyword frequencey of pages, can't they just compare one to another and reward/penalize acordingly?

[ADAM Web Design]

The only thing they would compare in terms of two pages would be the final score. To compare a page in keyword density to the existing #1 for all permntations and combinations of keywords and phrases and have all of that stored, as suggested, would just be too much.

[brian.mark]

Think of how many terms they already have. Many searches are only performed once every few months, and billions are performed each month. You think they're going to keep track of how much SEO is on the top page for billions of queries? I really doubt it.

I'd say it's much more likely that you were a little over the top and came back down below that line with the changes you did.

Brian.

[KeithO]

In my experience, adult oriented sites tend to focus more on teasers images and very little actual text. With what little text there is being stuffed with keywords, that ratio can be easily disporportionate.

If you need me furthur, I'll be in a confessional. :)

[marketershandbook.com]

Hi,
just to let you know, my adult oriented site isn't outright porn lol.

The only images are a header graphi and a book cover graphic. The rest is text, and quite a lot of it i might add :)

So no need to go to confessional with my site :)