Comments on: Backlinks Or On-Page SEO – Which Team Wins?

By: Nick Stamoulis

Nick Stamoulis — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 12:13:17 +0000

Hi Barry,
Thanks for the question, I actually addressed your question in a blog post that I just wrote:
http://www.searchengineoptimizationjournal.com/2009/11/19/pagerank-affect-rankings/

I hope this helps and best of luck with your SEO efforts.

By: Barry Lynn Miller -REMAX

Barry Lynn Miller -REMAX — Wed, 18 Nov 2009 23:15:35 +0000

When you do pick up a link and say its a pr of 2-5 when will it actually help your SEO
1. Right away
2. At the next time Google crawls your site
3. or when the new pr comes out

Another question that I have and you might have a post about it but and I don’t want to seem like I am spamming (although I do like the Link)

Every agent around me as a pr of 1 they have not figured the SEO concept out or don’t care but anyway
If I build up to say a pr of 3 will and use proper keywords should that kick me to top of the list?

There is an agent locally that has a 10 year + domain
My content is better
My backlinks are better

But she is still in front so it has to be domain age
her pr is 1 and mine is 1 but if I get to 3 will I start coming before her

I mean her content is terrible and hasn’t changed in months if not years

Sorry this is off topic

By: Nick Stamoulis

Nick Stamoulis — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 21:23:17 +0000

Hi Lorraine,
That is very interesting and I am not surprised…I too have encountered similar type of local SEO results for clients in the past. Perform onsite optimization re-write and improve the quality of the content and notice an improvement. I think in your scenario because the site was so old it already had a good trust factor. I would guess that if you were to do no link building the site would slowly slip down in the SERPs but with some good quality off site optimization this site should do very well long term.

By: Lorraine Grula

Lorraine Grula — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 18:56:10 +0000

Hi Nick
Daniel’s comment was interesting and I would like to share something similar.
I recently worked on a site for a local medical weight loss clinic. Their original site was embarrassingly BAD. We kept the old domain but build a new site that was chock full of great content. Before we got around to doing any back links, the site shot up to #1 for a wide variety of phrases. I was blown away. Granted most of the phrases were not terribly competitive due to the localized nature but even so, the bad site sat there for ten years without google ever noticing. One month after optimizing the site, there it was on top of the google!

Thanks
Lorraine

By: Nick Stamoulis

Nick Stamoulis — Sat, 17 Oct 2009 10:16:56 +0000

Hi Daniel,

Excellent example and potential case study, when you have it written, please share it with me as I would like to hear more!

By: Daniel

Daniel — Sat, 17 Oct 2009 06:09:22 +0000

Spot on.

As an experiment with a client site earlier this year, we left the orginal unoptimized site in place on it’s original domain and created a new on page optimized site on a new domain.

We fed backlinks appropriately to both sites. While the older site had a pr5 and the new site had a pr1, we quickly discovered that the new domain with On Page SEO w/backlinks ranked higher consistantly than the old unoptimized site filled with backlinks.

The results never failed in favor of the dual optimized site. Thanks for this post, it reminds me to turn that experiment into a case study whitepaper.

–Daniel

By: Nick Stamoulis

Nick Stamoulis — Thu, 15 Oct 2009 16:39:51 +0000

Hi MikeY,

Thanks for the comment. You would be surprised how many businesses still don’t understand that simple point…