Buzz is mounting over the new and improved version of Live.com. Via Lisa @Bruce Clay I read the Techmeme coverage where the roll out is said to include "significant advancements in core technology and consumer experience" – that sounds great so I took it for a test drive …
I ran a query that I happen to be working on these days related to weddings and getting married in Italy1 – I do business with professionals in this market and have sites ranking in the top 10. Getting married in Italy is a thriving business and quite competitive when it comes to rankings and organic placement.
Organic search engine placement isn’t a search engine specific activity – you work following criteria you know are good for the website and this will bring results across the board on all search engines – more or less: depending on your links and their heritage, a website achieves visibility that will vary depending on proprietary search engine algorithms.
When I run a query across the major search engines, I know the first 3 SERPs will carry mostly the same sites. But live.com stands out, I am seeing completely different results, so I ran a detailed check on a website positioned at #3 for this query:
here’s what I found:
- The domain name is relatively new (just over a year old)
- Counts a small number of pages with questionable content
- The number of incoming links is in the order of 100
- all incoming links are coming from 10 IPs, 7 of which are on the same Class C, and all from the same provider (kind’a suspicious isn’t it ?)
- The deep link ratio is ZERO
This site is ranking quite nicely and for a competitive keyword by setting up a mini-net re-enforced by links coming from a Free For All (and very popular) blogging platform here in Italy (http://blog.aruba.it/): fake posts with fake comments and real links to the mini-net. How sad.
Take a look – seeing is believing.
So this is the new and improved live.com ? Perhaps I’m missing something … please tell me where I went wrong, we all learn by our mistakes.
while I’m at it about live.com I’d like to ask them what’s a guy gotta do to get a site into their index after (suddenly) disappearing more than 1 year ago - ask the Pope to intervene ?
He’s close by and I do know a few people over at the Vatican City (just over 1 hour from where I work and live) so that’s within my reach.
In case you are browsing in highlight nofollow liks mode you’ll notice that the last 3 links are all nofollowed – I think they don’t deserve and link love and they’re not getting it from me
- I’m not going to disclose the exact query not to compromise my Clients and the results so far achieved [↩]
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Good analysis. Just goes to show you that yes, which search engine you use does matter.
It’s interesting that it didn’t take into account deeplinking, age etc. Although I do believe that Google is a little too “age-ist”. Oh well…the perfect algorithm won’t ever exist.
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