Richard & Judy Demonstrate TrustRank
The power of just one trusted link has often been discussed but isn’t often proved. Normally any site that has one trusted link also has lots of others so you can never really tell which links are passing the most weight.
TV stars Richard & Judy have their own wine club that ranks very well on Google for the term “Buy wine“, the site was launched in 2005 and has just 56 links according to Yahoo. A number of the links are nofollow from Wikipedia and most are from Channel4.com. Apart from the Channel4.com links there are only about 5 others so we can be sure that their rankings are based almost entirely on link weight from Channel4.
In fact the term “buy” isn’t even on their homepage and the site still ranks for “buy wine”.
It would be nice to hear more information about this. What exactly does this demonstrate about TrustRank that couldn’t be attributed to other factors such as domain age?
Comment by nickycakes — February 14, 2008 @ 12:29 pm
It certainly does put into question the whole argument for content and meta data….
Thanks for sharing, I think i’ll use this in my next presentation.
cheers.
Simon
Comment by Simon Dance — February 14, 2008 @ 1:04 pm
Very good points. Definitely raises the argument for content and meta data.
Comment by Searchtroop — February 14, 2008 @ 11:30 pm
Interesting example and you are probably correct about the impact of the C4 and other R&J sites. No doubt more would be revealed in their Webmaster Tools!
Possibly the term ‘buy wine’ is included in some of their inbound links - but hold on, it’s also included in their keywords tag…!
Comment by Web Search Australia — February 15, 2008 @ 2:42 am
We got a couple of article links from C4, along with some other ‘high profile’ links from news websites back in 2006 & it worked wonders after some on-page optimisation on our linked pages. I strongly believe PR has a huge impact on SEO specifically from authoritative news sites. They form the backbone for extra link building activity.
Comment by Kunle Campbell — February 16, 2008 @ 3:01 pm
Always good to see that meta description still helps a ‘little’ bit
Comment by Lenen — February 18, 2008 @ 2:26 pm
I have seen similar incidents with our site (for keywords that were hundreds of pages deep that catapulted to the top 10) all from a few links from sitepronews…
As you develop authority for your site, you will be able to test it more frequently yourself. What used to take months of custom content and link building, can be done with a blog post (competing with 300,000+ allinanchor pages). Believe it, authority is the final frontier.
Comment by SEO Design Solutions — February 18, 2008 @ 7:39 pm
It’s just a proof that a link from a quality authority site carries more value and really helps a site in terms of ranking than a bunch of links with low quality.
Comment by SEO Solutions — February 18, 2008 @ 8:20 pm