SEO Myth: Search engines favor large domains

As the owner of more than one large content domain that has been actively adding content and links since 1997, I can honestly say that I have personally seen the so-called “large domain effect” many times, where you add a new page or section about a new topic and you get almost instant rankings success.

As the owner of more than one small content domain that has been actively creating content and links since 1999 or thereabouts, I can also say that I have personally seen small domains trump large, tightly focused domains for their keywords in a variety of search engines, including today’s Google and Yahoo!.

Size doesn’t matter and anyone who tells you otherwise doesn’t have a clue about search engine optimization.

Search engines are looking for relevance and user satisfaction. Sometimes technically relevant content isn’t what the users are looking for. Sometimes a query is relevant to too many types of content. So each engine plays with its relevance scoring and makes adjustments. They also ban sites, filter sites, penalize sites, and favor sites in their search results.

But many highly visible, outspoken people in the search engine optimization industry still struggle with the fundamental concepts of optimization. Just because someone writes something on a blog or a forum doesn’t mean he knows what he is talking about. All it really means is that he has the nerve to share his ideas with the public. And while there is something to be said for the confidence we express in our willingness to share our ideas, that don’t have anything to do with search results.

There are four reasons for why your site performs well (or poorly) in search results:

1. You do something good or bad with your site
2. Other people do something good or bad with their sites
3. The search engines do something good or bad with their data
4. People search for whatever you’re most relevant to or they search for something else

That’s the “this ain’t rocket science” part of search engine optimization.

At its simplest, most basic and fundemantal level search engine optimization is all about striking a balance between what you do and what everyone else is doing. You can read all the nonsense in the blogs and forums about how you need to build links, build links, build links that you want — I’ll kick your butt in the SERPs every time if you’re just going to scrabble around the Web for links.

Some people do build up huge networks of Web sites that throw thousands of links at campaigns almost instantly (the smarter folks roll out their links over a measured period of time with some randomization built into the process). But most people don’t have 10,000 Web sites to work with.

Most people have to do the optimization thing the hard way, one page at a time. The famous Greek mathemetician is reported to have said, “Give me a fulcrum and a place to stand — and I will move the world.” That principle remains as true today as it was thousands of years ago, and it’s equally true for search engine optimization as for engineering.

When you set out to influence search results you are putting forces into motion that act according to certain laws and principles. You don’t have to be any more aware of what those laws or principles are than you are aware of the physics involved in prying a closed door open with a crowbar.

You do something you were shown how to do and it works. That’s the way most people practice search engine optimization today. Whole crowds follow after gurus who have tricks or techniques that work. The B.S. meisters who don’t tell you everything — the guys behind the curtains — quickly lose their followers because after a while even the most dense idiot has to realize that his failure to rank based on Super Secret Formula 13 has nothing to do with his own ability.

Either the formula no longer works or it never worked at all. A fair number of people offer marketing advice who don’t apply it themselves — but they sell a lot of marketing tutorials, tools, and Web services. You may never have heard of those people. I’ve run into quite a few of them in my own unending quest for Super Secret Formula 14. Sadly, the first 13 didn’t work (and I’ve always believed that 13 was my lucky number).

In search engine optimization today, most people babble endlessly about links. The link effect undisputably works, but for most people it only works temporarily. You play the reciprocal-links-that-are-not-reciprocal-links game over and over again, starting over as soon as someone cooks up a new variation on the old recipe because the search engines keep figuring out and filtering the old variations.

At its deepest level reciprocation works because it makes up the structure of the Web. If you have 100 pages on your site you unquestionably have a lot of reciprocation among your pages. But people in the industry excuse that away and say those reciprocal links don’t really count because they all come from the same domain.

But if you have a network of business sites (say, in the travel industry) and all your sites link to each other, you may very well dominate numerous search queries. Is it because of the reciprocal links or is it for another reason? Some people would be quick to argue either that the links are “relevant” and therefore okay or maybe that “the search engines know the sites all belong to the same company”.

The fact that reciprocal links are considered acceptable by the search engines should never be questioned. What the search engines care about are obviously manipulative links where the only business reason for two sites to swap links is that both may benefit in the search results. You have the right to boost your own content from within your own network, and you have the right to build brand equity throughout your network. Search engines, on the other hand, recognize that brand equity means people will search for those equitable brand sites that have proven themselves.

A site doesn’t have to do much to prove itself except stand out from the crowd. Anyone can do a travel site. But there is only one Travelport. Hm. I may have linked to the wrong site. Maybe I want to link to this Travelport site instead. No, maybe not. Well, it could be there is a crowd of Web sites out there that are all owned by Travelport.

So what? Most people are going to type in travelport.com and get to the right place anyway, aren’t they? Ah, the power of dot-com. I remember being at a book signing one day where the store manager excitedly got on his P.A. system and announced my presence to his customers. He concluded by saying, “And you can find out more about Michael on his Web site, Xenite-dot-com”.

“dot-ORG!” I shouted hastily.

“dot-ORG — sorry, Michael” he said.

Now, do the search engines have magic algorithms that figure out which site is actually more official than the other? Or is it that they are looking at more than just one factor? Maybe search engines really do try to take a lot of things into consideration.

A few years ago I became annoyed with a hyperpromotional self-promoter. His picks and shovels are (not) guaranteed to help you make millions of dollars on the Internet in the latest gold rush. I noticed he was proudly ranking for a particular well-trafficked query. I also noticed he had about 10,000 very tightly focused backlinks boosting his flagship site.

So I created a page on a Web site and pushed it up to the top position for his query. Now, I pointed a few links at the page but I didn’t do anything sneaky and I wasn’t able to slam it with 10,000 pieces of anchor text.

So why did my page knock his out of the SERPs? Maybe because I just happened to make a more relevant page than he did and I only pointed enough links at the page to help the search engines find it and see that its backlink profile matched its content.

That’s a secret you won’t find many people talking about on the Web: building agreement between links and content. Oddly, it is the assumption that there is agreement between links and content that leads search engineers to foolishly trust links as much as they do. Spammers happily exploit that misplaced trust every day, but legitimate Web site operators exploit it, too.

The problem is that people wander around SEO blogs and forums, and maybe hobnob with their best drinking buddies at conferences and bars, and they conclude that links are the secret to search success because every one they know just uses links to boost their pages.

Show of hands: how many of you have built a site and just allowed it to rank on its own for 3 months? No link building? No rushing out to directories…no dropping links in blogs and forums…no buying links…no boosting from your personal domain?

I have to do this quite often. Now, don’t get me wrong. If I have the ability to leverage links, I will leverage links. But I have domains I had to boostrap into search results success for lack of resources. You can do it with enough unique content pages and an XML sitemap. Does this approach guarantee success? Nope. Nothing guarantees success.

After all, you may go out and buy 20 PR 8 links but the guy above you may have bought 40 PR 8 links. He may have twice as much content as you or half as much. He may have bought an aged domain or not. He may or may not be doing anything special.

Xenite.Org may be a large content domain by some standards (more than 1,000 pages of content) but I compete with huge professional sites in the entertainment industry: SciFi.com, AskMen, IMDB, et. al. I also compete with Wikipedia. I don’t win every battle. But I outrank all of those huge, link-richer, content-heavier sites for many competitive queries.

I have even smaller sites that also compete against educational resources, heavily linked-to scientific resource sites, professionally edited information archives — again, I win some and I lose some. If the search engines were really favoring large content domains or older domains I’d never be able to launch a new site.

I don’t link bait. I don’t run out to social media sites and plug all my content. I think I have two active social media accounts and both are just barely active. I’ve rarely posted anything to a social media site. There are so-called SEOs who live and breathe social media. You have to ask yourself, however, are they making most of their money from those social media operations or are they bringing home the bacon some other way?

My job is to influence organic search results with good content. My personal avocation for 11 years has been to create interesting content for other people to read and enjoy. I’ve never been daunted by the goliaths on the Web. They may outrank me for more queries than I outrank them but then they have more content and I’m just not chasing that many queries. I’m good with that.

Most commercial sites see less traffic than my personal sites do, too. I’m also good with that.

Search engine optimization begins with what you do on your own pages. You cannot control what other people do on their pages. You can whine on forums and blogs but you cannot control what the search engines do with their data.

But when it comes to what people search for, you also have a little leeway there. You can suggest to people what they should be searching for. If you make good suggestions then people will search for your content and find it. That’s truly, honestly part of the search engine optimization process.

Link building can enhance search engine optimization, but it’s only a very small part of true optimization. Most people who struggle with search engine success — in my experience — depend way too much on off-site factors. They don’t think about how to insert those keywords into every nook and cranny on their pages. They don’t think about leveraging their own navigational links. They don’t stop agonizing over the fact that someone else grabbed a good domain name and just create their own good URLs.

In short, most people who practice search engine optimization — real search engine optimization — don’t look up from the keyboard long enough to care about whose site has more pages. If all else fails you can always create more content.

And no one can take that away from you. No one.