Wednesday
The next day I woke and still found no results (lesson #2 – Google is taking more than 2 days to index new stuff).
Thursday
On day 3 Google finally returned one result when I search for goodroipow – they returned a paper.li url which had scraped the keyword from Twitter. (lesson #3 – Established websites (even ones that are scraping) can easily outrank new sites). To make things even more interesting the paper.li page had already updated itself with new twitter messages and no longer had the keyword on its live page.
Friday
Finally on day four I checked the Google serp and found the winner – Non-keyword url with backlinks was ranking #1 (lesson #4 – Backlinks are generally more important than url structure). But I also noticed that Google didn’t even rank the keyword url in the serps. That might be because of it is duplicate content but Google did not display the typical message of “click here for similar webpages”. Maybe Google hasn’t visited the keyword blogspot post, so this test might not be finished just yet.
One Month Later
The exact page on blogspot still doesn’t rank, but my blogspot user profile mentioning the phrase in the post does. Graywolf’s Twitter page also ranks.
Three Months Later
The exact page on blogspot page still only ranks when you click the “repeat the search with the omitted results included” link, only the user profile page ranks in the natural SERP listings.
Now of course this simple test is not perfect. For example what if Google isn’t rewarding backlink but rather they are rewarding usage data and since I posted the non-keyword url in WebmasterWorld it had more visitors. That is a possibility and there are many variables that could be at play. It should be interesting to see how the serp changes after this blog post is published. The fifth lesson that I learned from this is that even when you know an answer to a question, running a simple test to reconfirm the answer can help lead you to learn new things that you didn’t know.
photo credit: Avengers Movie Website
