I was having a chat with a buddy of mine, and he mentioned a bike his friend was about to purchase. An ‘R1’ he said. I am not fluent with motorcycles, so I quickly googled “r1 bike”. I was very surprised, laughed, and showed him what Google listed as #1 out of 1.9 million results for ‘r1 bike’. A site in the UK called Crafts-Unlimited has a page selling a kit to cross stitch a Yamaha YZF R1. Yes I said ‘cross stitch’. This is a page where you can buy a kit to sew your next family heirloom of a shiny red 8.7” x 6.1” Yamaha motorcycle (no, I don’t get it either).
At first, I thought this has to be an anomaly. At the least, I had to have found some kind of hole in the Google search ranking algorithm. Seriously. A site that sells sewing kits, has one page with a fuzzy picture of a kit for a motorcycle pattern. The search term ‘r1 bike’ gets them the #1 spot. Take a look at the sites that made up the rest of the top ten on that search:
• Popular Mechanics - 2002 Yamaha R1 Motorcycle
• BikePics - Yamaha YZF-R1 Home Page on BikePics.Com
• Yamaha YZF-R1 Accessories, Yamaha YZF-R1 R1 Bike Covers (the Yamaha website !!! )
• An R1 bike rider tapes a Civic crashing into her. (reddit.com)
• eBay: MAISTO 2004 YAMAHA YZF R1 BIKE 1/12 DIECAST RED (item ... (ebay)
• Amazon.com: R1 Bike Covers: Sports & Outdoors (amazon)
• Motorcycle Online: First Ride: Y2K Yamaha R1 (motorcycle.com)
Lets take a look at the page source. My search was “r1 bike” so obviously those are important words for search engines to find in the page. Lets compare #1 Crafts Unlimited to #2 Popular Mechanics.
Here are the headers for this page on Crafts Unlimited:
<head>
<meta name="description" content="yamaha yzf r1 bike Cross Stitch kit">
<meta name="GENERATOR" content="Microsoft FrontPage 4.0">
<meta name="keywords" content="yamaha,yzf r1,bikes,cross,stitch,kits,charts,vehicles">
<meta name="ProgId" content="FrontPage.Editor.Document">
<title>Yamaha YZF R1 Bike Cross Stitch Kit (No Frames)</title>
</head>
The words “R1” and “bike” are both in the list, and interestingly right next to each other. They kept it simple, and used a short list of keywords.
Here is the header from Popular Mechanics:
<title>Popular Mechanics - 2002 Yamaha R1 Motorcycle</title>
<meta name="site" content="PopularMechanics.com"><meta name="Description" content="2002 Yamaha R1 Motorcycle">
<meta name="Keywords" content="automotive, new cars, motorcyles, yamaha, R1, 2002 car shows, 2003 car shows, 2004 car shows, auto shows, auto technology, automotive, automotive news, … (truncated)
they misspelled ‘motorcyles’ (oops)
Note that ‘bike’ is not in the meta keywords for the Popular Mechanics page. However, ‘bike’ shows up 4 times in the text of the article, and another 4 times on other parts of the page. “R1 shows up 8 times. It is interesting that it is also not found in h1,h2,h3,strong, or even in bold on that page. I also noticed that the source for the Crafts Unlimited page did not have one single h1, h2, or h3. However, “<strong></strong>” was used around “Bike Cross Stitch Kit” and “YAMAHA YZF R1”. The word “Bike” only appears one time in the test of the page, as does “R1”. That matches the keywords from the header, and the title of the page.
So I am still a bit confused, as to how this was the number one google search listing for a search that yielded nearly 2 million pages. What is the golden rule of getting into the top ten of search engines? Anyone, anyone (sorry)? I have always thought it was having other highly ranked sites linking you: links, ‘backlinks’, and ‘trackbacks’. I know I have read that somewhere. The keyword relevance is there, but it is it really that much better than the Popular Mechanics page? This one must be about the links. Right? Lets try the google linking search (put “link: ” in front of any url to see who links to that url)
link: www.crafts-unlimited.co.uk 66 results
Again, I am a bit confused. Meta keywords, title of the page, and one instance of each keyword in the body of a page, 166 links to the website. That number of links is nothing to sneeze at, but check out the competition:
link: www.popularmechanics.com 270,000 results
link: www.yamaha-motor.com 37,700
link: www.bikepics.com 59,400
link: cgi.ebay.com 5,540,000
link: www.motorcycle.com 29,300
The confusion continues. We know the meta tags are important. The page for Crafts Unlimited only had 8 keywords, 9 words, and 53 characters. The PM page had 73 words in 34 keywords, for a total of 411 charters. Is PM being penalized for having too many kewords? CU had ‘r1’ in the 2nd keyword, and ‘bikes’ in the 3rd. PM had only ‘R1’ in the 5th keyword. The description content for CU had “r1 bike”, where as PM only had “R1”. The order may matter to some search engines, as well as a combination of the order and the number of words listed for content.
Is that it? Probably not. A solid match on both keywords, and description seems to have won this ranking. I still find it hard to believe that there are not more relevant pages out there based on the meta keywords, descriptions, placement within page title, h1,h2,h3 tags, or even straight occurrences within a page. However, I do not care to analyze the source of all 1.9 million pages found. Sorry, just call me lazy.