Words: Ashley Rigg
Published: 27th March 2008
The most powerful websites in the world
Google is the biggest search engine in the world for one reason: it is consistently better than its competitors at returning relevant results. It’s not perfect, and a multi-billion dollar industry (SEO) has grown up dedicated to helping companies
cheat their way to the top of the results.
If you want to beat your competitors in the rankings, it is important to understand a little about what Google considers to be relevant or important. The words you have on your web pages count, especially when your competitors can’t get their act together to get the basics right. However, as markets get more competitive, it is “off the page” factors like inbound links that begin to tell.
Under the hood of Google
In a recent article,
Seomoz used a tool to strip out “on the page” factors to see how Google ranks websites when the effect of keywords on the page is removed. You can search Google using this search string: "inurl:com site:.com" to find the
1000 most important .com sites and you can use a similar string to find the most important sites on other top level domains like
.co.uk. The results read like a Who’s Who of the web.
.com real estate sites in the Top 1000
Given the size of the real estate vertical, it is surprising that only one* real estate website, Real Estate Journal, makes it into the
Top 1000 .com results. Three of the biggest US portals, Zillow, Realtor and Trulia are conspicuous by their absence. There is no space either for any of the large UK-based .com portals like
FindaProperty.com and
Primelocation.com.
.co.uk property sites in the Top 1000
Analysing
.co.uk domains produces more property-related websites, but not the ones you might expect. There is no place for
Rightmove.co.uk despite its market-leading position and huge stock market valuation. The only dedicated overseas property portal in the list is
World of Property. Not a name that slips off the tongue when talking about the best overseas portals but maybe one for the future.
| Position |
URL |
PageRank |
Inbound links** |
Owner |
| 385 |
www.homesandproperty.co.uk |
6 |
344,000 |
Daily Mail Group
|
418
|
www.ukpropertyshop.co.uk |
6 |
1,250 |
Independent |
| 422 |
www.housetohome.co.uk |
6 |
73,500 |
IPC Media
|
| 524 |
www.propertytoday.co.uk |
6 |
1,610,000 |
Johnson Press
|
| 630 |
www.idealhomemagazine.co.uk |
6 |
113,000 |
IPC Media
|
| 681 |
www.worldofproperty.co.uk |
6 |
86,200 |
Johnson Press
|
| 713 |
www.homesonsale.co.uk |
4 |
52,400 |
Independent |
| 878 |
www.theratandmouse.co.uk |
3 |
2,620 |
Independent |
Not in Top 1000
|
www.hotproperty.co.uk |
4 |
23,100 |
Independent |
Not in Top 1000
|
www.rightmove.co.uk |
5 |
18,700 |
PLC (not part of media group)
|
The obvious conclusion
So why don’t the biggest property portals show up in Google’s rankings of the most important sites? At first glance, it is easy to conclude that they don’t have enough links to compete. After all, they are “out-linked” by top performers Real Estate Journal and Homes & Property. Link volume undoubtedly has an influence but there are so many exceptions that this would be a misleading conclusion. London blog The Rat and Mouse, with 2,620 links, outranks Rightmove with 18,700 and UK portal Fish4.co.uk has
1,430,000 inbound links but does not appear in the Top 1000.
Big media brands have an advantage
There is a stronger, less obvious trend at work. With the exception of UK Property Shop, all the top-performing sites are owned by big media groups. Why is this? The big media groups could have bought them because they perform so well. However, the fact that housetohome.co.uk and idealhome.co.uk are brand extensions from their magazines suggests this is not the case.
The more likely explanation is that Google is deliberately biasing results towards big media brands. Every day, there are thousands of people trying to trick Google by buying or generating inauthentic links. In response, Google has biased the way it ranks sites towards those that have a strong vested interest in maintaining editorial integrity. They seem to have made an assumption that the more “respectable” the media brand, the more valuable their website is.
The table below provides strong empirical evidence of this trend. Nearly 20% of the pages in Google’s Top 1000 .co.uk sites are from national newspapers. Google seems to trust the BBC and broadsheet newspapers more than the tabloids. With headlines like
“Man Fights Shark With Wife’s False Teeth”, The Sunday Sport doesn’t get on the list at all.
UK national newspaper website
|
Number of sites in Top 1000
|
| BBC |
141 |
TimesOnline
|
23 |
| Telegraph |
16 |
| Guardian |
9 |
| Independent |
4 |
Daily Mail Group
|
2 |
The Sun
|
2 |
| Express |
0 |
Mirror
|
0 |
Sunday Sport
|
0 |
Trust & Integrity
The data in this article is evidence for an algorithm often known as TrustRank. It states that Google seeds trust with a few hundred “seed sites” and that these sites, and those that are close in the link chain to the seed sites, are given a significant boost in the rankings.
Implications for estate agents and developers
- Get links from sites that have strong editorial content. Even if they don’t have many inbound links, if they produce good content, other editorial sites are likely to link to them which will boost their TrustRank
- Invest in PR – there are a small group of very powerful journalists working online for the national and local press. Develop relationships with them like Brian did
- Invest time in building relationships with good property blogs in the same way you would property journalists
- Where possible, go for quality over quantity. One link from a great site can be worth a thousand links from poor sites. If a site is not valuable to users, think twice about spending your valuable time requesting or adding a link
- Be careful about using PageRank as a key metric. A PageRank zero site on the BBC is often worth more than a link from some other PageRank 5 page
- Watch out for overseas property portals owned by large media groups. Homesoverseas.co.uk, owned by Trinity Mirror, and World of Property, owned by Johnson Press, could take some share off the big players if they execute their SEO correctly
*We have only included homepages in our analysis, so that link comparison data is fair. The real estate sub-domains of AOL (890) and MSN (983) are excluded, as is a real estate page of the Chicago Tribune (841)
**Inbound links are taken using the search string linkdomain:www.amazon.co.uk -site:www.amazon.co.uk on
http://search.yahoo.com
User Comments
Hi Soren,
You're right, humans are not involved in this process. Google does favour sites that produce frequent content but this article is about the bias it gives to big media brands. You can produce great content but if trusted sources (big media sites and sites that have links from those sites) don't link it to it, you won't rank as well as if they do.
Ashley Rigg,
Globaledge.co.uk
Very interesting research although you make it sound like there are "humans" involved in deciding what sites should rank the highest.
This is not the case. What probably is happening is that Google favors sites that produce good and frequent content (such as news web sites) - and it ranks the "quality" of the content by looking at the page ranks of incoming links.
But I assume you are fully aware of this as otherwise you probably would not be producing good quality content like this article!
Soren Jensen,
Not Web Design