Recently I just launched this website and submitted for indexing to Google. Naturally I wanted to check google for one of my keywords I want to rank for, “Minneapolis SEO Expert”, and what popped up in the #1 spot shocked me.
Here is a screenshot of the web page that currently ranks #1 on Google for “Minneapolis SEO Expert”.
As you can see it is nothing more than just a web form.
So this got me thinking, how in the world did this page rank #1 for that search term? It must have a bunch of quality backlinks right? Wrong, this web page has 1 backlink from a website that is down!
Now I’m baffled because this makes no sense at all!
Google Ranking Guidelines
There are a number of factors that Google considers when ranking a web page in it’s results, and then everyone has their own opinion on best practices.
One thing that I take into consideration when creating a page to rank on Google is the quality of content on the page. Quality of content is important because quality content is what keeps visitors on your site. It’s a known fact that a high bounce rate tells Google that people simply don’t think your content is relevant to their search.
So for a page to have no backlinks and no content to rank #1 for any search term seems impossible! It must have some really good on page SEO right?
Wrong, based on the report pictured below, this website scores 45 out of 100 for on page optimization.
No matter how I slice or dice this web page, there is no logical reason I can find why it is coming up as the #1 results. This guy must have the secret sauce!
How To Combat Bad Google Results
The sad thing is, there is very little you can do to make this website fall down the rankings. I truly believe that in a week or two this websites rankings will fall because people who click to the website will likely hit the back button and increase the bounce rate for this page. This will tell Google that the quality of the content is not what users are expecting and will therefore replace this listing with something that is more relevant.
All you can do when you run into something like this is to keep publishing quality content and building quality backlinks. Since my website is brand spanking new, I haven’t had much time to obtain #1 rankings but I can guarantee that within a month or so you will see this website on the top of Google for the search term “Minneapolis SEO Expert”!
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