It appears that Google added a snazzy feature to see the CTRs of your top search queries in their Webmaster Tools. Here’s my website’s data for the above query:

So that’s a factor of 4-6 times better than the normal CTRs accepted as the standard in our industry.  How is that possible?  What’s attracting searchers to my search engine listing?  Let’s take a step into the mind of a searcher and examine their thought process.

So what’s working for our website?

• Title of the website matches their exact search query
• Url of the website matches their exact search query
• Description of the listing matches their search intent – They are probably looking for a list of controversial issues and possible further elaboration on these topics
• Url of the website is .org – Conveys a sense of authority and trust among many searchers especially on a query like this
• 1st result’s url is an ip address
• None of the other listings include all of the search keywords in their urls

What’s causing some organic traffic to click on our competitors?

• Sitelinks under the 1st and 2nd listing
• 1st and 3rd listings’ titles exactly match their search and the 2nd listing includes all of the search keywords

You’ve thinking “who cares that your website is a fluke and doesn’t follow the trend?”  Indeed this website is a bit of an oddity, but you should still care.  You now have the ability to see how modifying your title and meta description tag influence SERP click through rates on specific queries and pages.  Yeah, you could have estimated the changes these alterations would have had previously, but there’s a much larger margin of error because of the noise you have to deal with.  Isn’t it about time you reoptimized your page titles and descriptions to take full advantage of organic search rankings by boosting your CTRs well above the norm?

2 weeks after the purchase (December 7), the previous owner’s entire network got dropped in the Google serps from the first page for their search terms to the back of the index, ranging from page 30-88. However, my site was performing fantastic, and it was on the path to making back my initial investment in 3-4 months. It did not get knocked down with his entire network, so I thought it might just be some odd fluke, or I did not get hit when he did because the registration details changed and that things would soon change for me as well. Indeed things did change; 2 weeks after his site dropped (December 22), my site dropped to the back of Google’s index.

So I could have waved goodbye to the money that I did not make back yet, but I decided to do a little investigative work to see what really happened.  The index page had no content and only links to the category pages that then linked to the actual articles; this is not ideal, but was not the cause of this penalty.  The 8 links on the blogroll linked back to the original owner’s related sites with anchor text keyword1 keywordx keyword2; only keywordx varied with each link.  The anchor texts of these links was changed, so that keyword1 and keyword2 were exchanged for synonymous words, removed, or reworded to sound more natural.  These links were clearly over optimized, and Google probably picked up on the fact that they did not appear natural, but instead appeared like someone was trying to manipulate the serps. I slowly proceeded to change these anchor texts over the next 2 weeks.

Furthermore, the meta description looked like: “Keyword1 keyword2 keyword3.  The best place for keyword1 keyword4 keyword2 keyword3. Keyword1 keyword2 keyword3″.  Making a meta description look more spammy is almost a challenge.  The meta description was changed to, “Keyword1 keyword2 keyword3 (3 other non-keywords) keyword4 (7 other non-keywords)”.  Clearly the previous meta description was spammy and was a likely cause for the Google over optimization penalty.

If you can believe it, there were even more causes for this over optimization penalty hidden within this website.  The site used a modified WordPress template, and keywords were stuffed into corners and places where they obviously did not belong.  A glance at the source code revealed keywords in unusual locations (greyhat bordering on blackhat seo).  These excessive, hidden, or unnecessary keywords were removed in order to help remove this penalty.  In all honesty, I’m surprised it actually took Google 9 months from this websites start for them to see this over optimization; I guess these things just take time.

The over optimization penalty first appear on this website on December 22; I started initiating changes over the next 2 weeks as I discovered a handful of inappropriate practices.  On January 4th, the website regained its top rankings for its search terms.  Since then, the website has been bouncing between its previous top 3 ranking for a variety of search terms to a ranking of 9, 10, and 11 depending upon which Google data center is used to check to serps.  Note that it may take some time for your rankings to completely stabilize to their pre-penalty values.  If you have been hit with a Google over optimization penalty, it should be obvious what changes need to be initiated in order for you to regain your old ranks.

The other side to this determining trust is who you link out to.  If you link to non-reputable and spammy resources, then your website will lose trust.  One last factor may play into the trust that is designated to a certain domain or websites; this is registration details.  Google is a registrar of domains; thus they can see who owns what domains, and they already know what these websites link to.  If the majority of your portfolio contains spammy or link farm like websites, one could make the assumption that on a whole, domains with your contact details could be flagged as having a greater chance of not being trustworthy. These are the factors that play into determining the trust a domain or website has.

Website authority is a bit simpler to understand; authority is a measure of how many website link to your domain and how these websites link to you.   Different links hold various authorities; the sum of these links and the authority associated with them determines your authority.  Google PageRank was once a good measure of authority, but it has recently been tainted by manipulative webmasters.  Google likely accounts for this tainting by adjusting the trust of these websites.  The diversity of a websites link profile is another factor.  If your website has 100 links from 1 different website, this will not be as affective at raising authority as having 100 links from 25 different websites. 

Authority can also be considered on a webpage to webpage basis compared to trust which is generally viewed as a global website factor.  A singular webpage of a website may have authority, while the rest of the website might be filled with non-authoritative content.  This touches upon the concept of deep linking and the importance of building deep links.  Domain / website authority and trust can be broken down into these concepts, but their value to a website in seo is clearly significant.

If you are one of the lucky and few people who first post and provide information regarding this keyword phase, your webpage will have a distinct advantage over all of the webpages that target that keyword phase.  I have seen instances where a website with little authority or age itself and a moderately aged review post with no links pointing toward it and little on page optimization outranks a well optimized and linked to post on a more authoritative domain. 

The first review post had little going for it aside from being one of the first to write a review prior to the huge spike of posts that followed.  The second website posted their review after this spike and likely ranked for this keyword phase because of their quality on page optimization, links, and the authority of the website.  In addition to the benefits provided by search engines, being the first to post also give other advantages.  When that huge spike occurs and even after as the topic dies down, people that write about it will be more likely to cite and/or link to your webpage because of its age and the visibility of it in search engines. 

Better visibility in search engines essentially means that the higher you rank for a keyword phase, the more likely people will be to link to you simply because you rank for that phase.  Granted having quality content helps increase the chances of people linking to you, even if you content is sub par compared to other websites in the rankings, people will still link to the higher ranked website more often than not.  The benefits of being the first to post are important with regards to search engine rankings and linking.  Instead of trying to catch up with all of the runaway popular keyword phrases, try to be one of the first to post about a new up and coming topic.

At first, we figured that site owners or people running tests would notice, but they didn’t.

Classic PageRank (ignoring the decay flow factor of 10-15%) was seen like this: a site with “10 PageRank points” and 10 outgoing links (5 of which are nofollow) will give each link without nofollow 2 PageRank points.  However, now a site with the same structure will only give each of the links without nofollow 1 PageRank point.  Links with the nofollow attribute are designated their respectful PageRank, but when the times comes to assign it, this PageRank simply disappears.

What does this mean for webmasters?  Matt Cutts suggests that you let PageRank flow freely throughout your website; I agree with him to an extent, but I think that people will still try to PageRank sculpt in a new way.  This new PageRank sculpting will encourage webmasters to reduce the number of links on a webpage or hide these links away from getting PageRank by using iframes or other techniques to ensure that the other links on this webpage get the maximum flow of PageRank.  Some webmasters might even consider removing comments on their blogs because all of the links from comments is destroying their PageRank flow throughout their websites.

PageRank is clearly a much more complex topic than this.  For instance, link placement on a webpage affects the authority it is rewarded; a navigational sidebar link is going to be designated less PageRank that an in context link.  Time will tell if people start this new PageRank sculpting, but I doubt it will be beneficial for the time it takes to implement and its implementation will likely make a website awkward.  If it does become a new practice to optimize websites, one thing I believe is that Google will pickup on this and change their algorithms accordingly.