Google Is Not Broken

In spite of what many think, Google is not broken. But wait, naysayers will say, Look at this search result, it stinks! This spammer is succeeding in ranking high, they emerged from nowhere and are now in the top three results!

It’s true — there are many such examples that you can point to. Making sense of this landscape can be quite confusing, but that’s what I will attempt to do in today’s post.

Firstly, there are two basic reasons why Google can be quite slow to address some of the problems you might find.

1. They Can Afford To Be Thoughtful And Patient

Why, you ask? They have dominant market share. Here is the December 2013 market share data from comScore:

comScore notes that “‘Explicit Core Search’ excludes contextually driven searches that do not reflect specific user intent to interact with the search results.” In my experience, the practical impact of adjusting for this is that the Google search market share is a bit higher. Most sites I look at show a larger percentage of their organic search coming from Google than 67%.

Can You Rank In Google Without Content?

A WebmasterWorld thread has a webmaster who has a site that doesn't have any real content. It is basically statistical downloads and specifications downloadable as PDFs or Zip files.

Can you rank web pages with no content at all in Google?

A good example of a page that ranks without having the exact words on it is the Adobe Reader page which ranks for [click here].

But what about a page with almost no content? It is possible to rank on anchor text alone?

Yes, but it has to be very obscure and non-competitive words.