The Purple Pot of Golf SEO Experiment
The SEO experiment I’ve been blabbering on about since BarCamp Cape Town has germinated, and been hit by the rays of search engine spider sunshine…
Recently, Quirk, in conjunction with Rafiq, decided to run a little test using an obscure search term. Two domains were created and set up with identical web content, optimised for the surprisingly unpopular term Purple Pot of Golf. Iรยขรขโยฌรขโยขm quite shocked that some niche marketing guru hasnรยขรขโยฌรขโยขt jumped on the monetisation potential of this sure-fire traffic driver ๐ I guess thatรยขรขโยฌรขโยขs the Internet for you; awash with ripe opportunities.
Richard Branson has a great quote regarding oppurtunities…
With all other factors being equal, we hoped to isolate this single variable and determine its effects on ranking.
Both pages were given a link from the Quirk homepage, titled test 1 (Stokes Page) and test 2 (YBC Page) รยขรขโยฌรขโฌล effectively this meant thereรยขรขโยฌรขโยขd be another variable but one of the links would have to be first so we saw no way around it. So, the moment of truth. How would the big G rank them?
OK so the results were pretty much inconclusive due to a few factors:
- The titles of one of the sites had one of the QuirkStars in them, Lyle’s name appears on the Quirk Site already.
- The links were slightly different. when they were supposed to be the same namely test1 & test2.
We have decided to run the experiement again this time with different keyphrase and new sites.
Something we should consider when the next SEO experiment runs:
- The link should NOT come from a site managed by Quirk or Your Group of Web AddiCT(s);
- The links should be exactly the same.
- Rafiq gets to choose they arb keyphrase ๐
It was great working with the Quirk Massive on this, hopefully the first of many, SEO experiemnts. Read the whole Purple Pot of Golf story over at GottaQuirk