How does this domain / page rank for this particular term?

NaomiC

Hi everyone, I'm wondering whether someone can enlighten me as to how a particular page / domain is ranking for a term that the page appears to be in no way optimised to receive traffic to.

The search engine is Google Australia and the Search Term (albiet low volume) is "Bunbury Builders" the top organic result is the homepage for "Content Living" www.contentliving.com.au/

There is one single mention of Bunbury on the page (as a phone number in the footer of the page). I've disabled javascript, css, and spoofed my user agent as Googlebot and I can't see anything suspect going on here at all.

I also ran the domain through open site explorer and I couldn't find a single anchor text reference to bunbury directing visitors back to this domain.

We haven't yet begun targeting this term, but I was curious to see (for my own education as much as anything else) how they were achieving this ranking position.

Any feedback would be appreciated.

RyanKent

Hi Andrew.

When I began looking at this question I did not immediately realize it was a ccTLD of .au so I looked in Google.com and the results are quite different and probably more in alignment with what you would expect. The question is how much of the difference is attributed to the fact Google.com's algorithms are more updated with respect to Panda and other changes (it seems quite a lot), and how much of the difference is due to geographic targeting differences.

When I look at the site if I were to make a case to support the Bunbury association I would point out five items:

Bunbury is mentioned on the page
Bunbury is not in the footer, but above the actual footer. You could say the site has two footer areas, but clearly the area where Bunbury is located has more value then the smaller footer area below it.
Bunbury is in bold. More to the point, the page has no h1 tag, no italics used, no alt tags used, and only a total of 3 words in bold, so this emphasis has a lot of meaning. This isn't a case of a page with 100 attention getting mechanisms are in place with the emphasis weight divided.
Bunbury is one of only two locations mentioned on the page, Bunbury and Perth. This isn't a case where a page is trying to stuff 20+ locations to manipulate associations. It seems quite authentic.
A phone number is listed right below the Bunbury mention. I have no familiarity with Australian phone numbers but I presume it is a Bunbury number.

With all of the above considered, the question is whether that is enough for Google to associate Bunbury with the page. I understand your position that it isn't much. Google clearly feels it is enough. I would also share it appears very authentic so clearly Google got it right, but the question is how?

Well either the above alone is enough, or there are some external factors influencing the decision. Some external factors are:

You are correct the backlinks do not show any use of Bunbury in anchor text, but there are many links which have addresses in the URL linking to the page. These linking pages clearly have a strong association with a particular physical location, and this can definitely be understood by Google.
Google could consider the site's contact page which shows only two locations, one of which is Bunbury. In addition to the information from the home page, there is also a Bunbury fax number, a Bunbury physical address and an e-mail to the bunbury office which shows as bunbury@.
The domain ownership and hosting records do not show any Bunbury association and there is not any Google Places listing, but Google could also access business records such as business licensing for example. Google's algorithms are a closely guarded secret and we simply do not use what information is and is not used.

NaomiC

I concur that link two is absolutely spammy (it's not mine, we've not targeted this term yet), but there are other sites in the top 'x' results that have a higher domain authority, page authority, similar moz trust that could easily hold that position. The only thing holding the top 10 together (besides spam entry number 2) is that they all get an 'F' rating for on-site optimisation.

I just thought there would be more to this particular ranking.

Thanks for the response.

RobertFisher

Low query volume does impact it, but the first site while not screaming Bunbury builders, is a good site with a bunbury office (on the footer of every page and on the contact page with map, etc.)

When I look at site in position two..., sorry, but it says Bunbury builders too many times:

Bunbury House Builders

Home Builders Australia Bunbury page lists Bunbury builders including Bunbury new home Builders, Bunbury unit builders, Bunbury colonial home and timber home builders, Bunbury project home builders, Bunbury renovation builders, Bunbury removable home builders, carpenter builders in Bunbury, Bunbury design and construct or custom home builders.

The first site also has 28 linking root domains versus 1 for the higher domain auth site. This would seem counter intuitive, but it makes sense.

So, content is king, links are king, and when there are a low number of queries it would seem the better site with a few mentions of the keyword will beat out the stuffed site with 100 mentions.

RobertFisher