SEO Competition: Link Building vs On Site Optimisation – first week results

Posted at February 17, 2010

While down in London at SES the SEO Rock Stars are arguing if it’s better PPC or SEO ( to quote Bill Hunt: “Can’t we make them work together?”) the On Site SEO vs OFF site SEO experiment goes on. Once again a quick recap: exactly one week ago I challenged my friend Oscar, SEO Manager in a very well known travel website to rank as high as possible for the keyword Davide Corradi using only OFF site SEO techniques, while I’m trying to rank as high as possible for the keyword Oscar Carreras using only ON site SEO techniques. In three weeks time, the 23rd of March 2010, we’ll see who is the winner :-)

17 th February 2010 – Second Ranking Report

After one week of tweaking this site and one week after Oscar Carreras started his off site activities to his page (in all fairness we need to say that he temporarly paused his link building activities to see how long it takes for the page to go down) here are the results:

Oscar Carreras on www.davidecorradi.com

my main landing page is well indexed in all the monitored version of Google but despite I made some changes to the content is not been visited by Googlebot since the very first time (9 Feb 2010). The website is ranking with an archive page (in google.com and google.co.uk) or with the correct page (google.co.uk page from UK). The Home Page is not ranking anymore in Google. New Entry: Yahoo! WOW! I am ranking with the correct landing page in 5th position in Yahoo! and in 2nd (second!) position in Yahoo! UK. Impressive!

Davide Corradi on www.europeanseo.org

Oscar Carreras is losing positions in Google: his site is not ranking anymore with his landing page but with another page in Google.com and is ranking in the second page of google.co.uk (we need to say that he wrote an article about what he did so that my name appears in more than one page and, at least in one of them, in some key areas such as title tag, heading 1 etc). Similar to me he made his first appearance in Yahoo! in quite a good position.

Both the pages are still not indexed in Bing which is something really disappointing.

First week takeways:

On page techniques are giving more consistent results. Off page activities are powerful but need to be constantly performed. Your competitors will take advantage and overtake you if you stop. Don’t.

My website is a .com hosted in Italy but is ranking well in Google.co.uk (page from UK): this make me think that Google is deciding the location of a website using these 3 criteria (in order of importance):

Google is giving too much lots of weight to Social Media. One of this spam site retwitting services republished a tweet about this competion and now is ranking for my targeted keyword higher than my original page!

It seems that Yahoo! gives lots of weight to On Site elements: I frankly found my current ranking exagerated but that’s something to consider and monitor with attention. I wonder if next week we’ll see different results…

Bing: helloooooooo! it’s been one week dudes!

Next update tuesday 24th of February. Can’t wait…

Quick Note: After literally 3 minutes I’ve published this post I jumped up in position 18 in Google.com: Google is bloody quick!!

Quick Note #2: Different Google datacenter in the same geographic area are giving pretty different results (up to 4 or 5 position difference).

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