How to Get a DOUBLE First Page Ranking on Google
March 21st, 2008 by MarkYesterday Court talked about the authority listing Google gave him recently. Today I wanted to talk about another kind of search engine ranking you can achieve – an indented listing, or as I like to call it – a ‘double ranking’. That’s right folks – you can rank two pages of your website for exactly the same keyword phrase. What does that mean? It means twice as much real estate on the first page of Google! Tempting?
I’m sure most of you have seen seen indented listings in the Google’s search results before. Here’s an example from my ecommerce site, where I sell trailer hitches and hitch related accessories:
The site holds the fourth and fifth positions for the keyword ‘nba hitch covers’. When you see an indented listing like this in the SERPs it means that both pages listed have enough authority for that keyword phrase to be included.
Whichever page shows up as the main listing is the one with more authority, or relevance, in the eyes of the Google bots. The homepage isn’t necessarily the one with the most authority, as you can see with my ‘nba hitch covers’ ranking.
So what does the SEO of my ecommerce site have to do with your blog? Quite a bit actually.
Avoiding the ‘Empty Shell Effect’
When you get an indented listing it means that you’re not only achieving a high number of links, it means you’re getting links deeper into your site. Nothing sends the message that your site is relevant and credible to Google like having a nice percentage of your inbound links pointing to the interior pages of your site. If you only get links to the homepage, you’re suffering from what some people call the empty shell effect, which tells Google your site is potentially spam because your interior pages have very few links to them.
So How Can You Get Double Ranked?
You’ve heard this before, but the first thing to do is write high quality, link-worthy content. Every time Court posts on this site he gets at least a few backlinks to that post from people who mention his content on their own site. As a result, a large percentage of his inbound links point somewhere other than the homepage. Google’s algorithm likes that – a lot.
Other than writing link-worthy content, there are a few things you can proactively do to get two rankings for the same keyword. One thing you can do is use the Related Posts plugin for wordpress. Basically this plug-in scans the content and title of your posts and puts links to similarly titled posts at the bottom of the page.
So, if Court is writing posts with the term ‘internet marketing’ in the title, Related Posts will put links to posts containing similar keyword phrases on the same page. What does that do? It gives him relevant links with relevant anchor text all over his site, so the interior pages of the site gain authority for that keyword.
Get the Right Links in Your Content
You can also proactively build links to pages whose authority I want to increase by linking back to them with the appropriate anchor text within the content you’re writing. Court talked about that just the other day as way of increasing the authority of your homepage; of course it works the same way for your subpages.
I’m sure you can all see the advantage of occupying two positions in the search results for the same keyword. It gives you twice as much opportunity to grab targeted search traffic, and send them deeper into your site than you might otherwise have gotten them. The lesson is – don’t forget to build strong, relevant links to the interior of your site while you’re working to build links to the homepage.
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March 21st, 2008 at 12:43 pm
Mark let me be the first to say that this post is spot on. A double listing will often bring A LOT more traffic than a single listing, not only because you are getting more of the listing’s real estate but also because it psychologically makes your site really stand out.
The methods outlined for creating a double listing are also very accurate. I love it Mark – thanks for coming up with a great post on a topic that I hadn’t thought of.
March 21st, 2008 at 1:25 pm
Mark,
I agree that a double listing on the front page will bring in a lot of traffic.
The thing that baffles me is that everyone says that everyone says “create worthwhile content to get linked to”.
However, when I look at the links that are associated with the page, all I see is INTERNAL links…there are no EXTERNAL links pointing to the page (and it makes sense since this site is an ecommerce site..why would another independent site want to link to it?)
So, I am guessing that the moral of the story is that if you want to get pagerank on an ecommerce site, it would be important to use anchor text on other pages for the keyword you are trying to rank for…am I right?
March 21st, 2008 at 2:18 pm
Actually when I did a link search (on yahoo) for the nba hitch covers page on my site Leo I came up with 37 external links to that url.
You’re partly right though – like I mentioned in the post, it’s crucial to set up the right internal link structure to make an ecommerce site (or any other site) rank well.
March 22nd, 2008 at 12:09 am
Hi again Mark…
Yeah, I wasn’t really looking at Yahoo external links but at Google links since it is the google search engine you are focusing on (I have always wondered why so many SEO’s worry about what links Yahoo claims since it is Google engine that most of us look at and gauge our success with.
March 22nd, 2008 at 9:17 am
Now I see what you mean Leo – you’re right, no external links according to Google to that page. The reason most SEO’s look at yahoo links because yahoo’s link search is a more accurate reflection of how many links a page really has.
Google just doesn’t show the majority of links you have to your site. So when it comes to number of links we look at yahoo, and when it comes to rankings, we care about Google.
March 21st, 2008 at 2:00 pm
You mention using Articlemarketer for your articles. I also use Articlemarketer but most of the links back are NA. Do these count toward building keyword authority?
Sorry if this is off topic.
March 21st, 2008 at 2:15 pm
Hey Denise-
Yeah, we do use Article Marketer, but I don’t know what you mean by “NA”.
We’ve actually had great success with Article Marketer as a link-building strategy – it’s what we’ve used the most with our ecommerce site.
March 21st, 2008 at 2:32 pm
NA referrs to the page rank of the article sites. I usually only get a couple with any page rank and most of them are PR0.
March 21st, 2008 at 2:44 pm
Denise keep two things in mind:
1. A PR0 link is much better than no link at all.
2. Since the links would be on brand new pages, you wouldn’t be able to see the PageRank even if it existed. Keep in mind that you can only see the PageRank change once every few months.
March 21st, 2008 at 2:52 pm
OHHHH!
So it is the page rank of the page my article is on? I never knew that.
I kept sending in articles and could never understand how this could help.
Now this makes since. Thank-you!
With Ezine Articles you get a PR6 right away. I thought I was doing something wrong.
March 21st, 2008 at 2:59 pm
Now to get that Related Post plug-in to work!
March 21st, 2008 at 3:59 pm
How long does it take Article Marketer to work? I have been doing the free trial for about 2 months now and have absolutely nothing to show for it. In addition, I did a review about those experiences on my blog and the comments I got were almost all negative as well.
Also, I know it is only the free trial I have used but if I can’t get any results with it, why on earth would I ever be motivated to pay for the service? After 2 months I cannot find one of my 5 articles that I have gotten accepted anywhere on the net. Thanks for any response to this.
March 21st, 2008 at 5:11 pm
Hey Nuker –
I just went over and read your review and the comments people left. Yeah, it sounds like you’re not having a great experience with that free trial. Truthfully, I’ve never done the free trial, so I can’t comment. I’m not that surprised to hear that their customer service isn’t great.
We’ve generally paid the $200 for two years, or $80 for three months.
Without going into a bunch of detail, all I can tell you and your readers is I attribute a big part of the seo success I’ve had with my ecommerce site (and Court has had with his sites) is due to link-building with Article Marketer. There are rankings I have that I know I wouldn’t have without them.
You usually do get what you pay for, and it seems A.M. needs to do a better job with their free trial.
March 21st, 2008 at 9:51 pm
Courtney thanks a lot for the information in theis post. I am just a beginner in this whole blogging home business industry. It is not that easy and I know that traffic ranking on Google can bring some really good targeted traffic. Keep up the great work with this blog.
March 22nd, 2008 at 3:11 pm
Double first page ranking huh. I will try anything twice. Thanks
March 24th, 2008 at 11:51 am
This post IS spot on.
Here’s another example of an indented listing
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&rlz=1T4SKPB_enUS236US236&q=3way+linkbuilding+explained
You’ll see the first 2 results for this long tail search result in an indented listing.
now, to get that authoity listing…. should be fun
Great post, good info!
Thanks,
Dan
March 25th, 2008 at 4:12 am
i will give a try. thx.
March 25th, 2008 at 12:47 pm
I was actually under impression that it’s a bad thing. I mean,why would google want 2 identilcal sites taking up the whole space. I know a website who has 2 links,then OWNS the other 3 websites,that basically point back to the main. Those people are basically taking 5 top ranks. Isn’t that something of a spam?
March 26th, 2008 at 2:53 am
Yeah many people only think about driving links to their homepage, when it’s very important to also link up your deep pages and make sure your internal link structure is set up properly so that all pages are getting link love.
March 30th, 2008 at 7:01 am
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April 10th, 2008 at 3:12 pm
This is a fantastic post! Getting your site ranked twice in Google is double the fun for the price of one search. I love how you emphasize the importance of good content, that’s really what a lot of this about. When you have that great content, then you’ll be able to get those deep links. As you point out, linking out benefits you a ton! We’re all in this together, which Google understands, so linking out to other authoritative sites is very beneficial! Thanks again for the great post, I’m learning so much!
December 31st, 2009 at 11:45 pm
“So, if Court is writing posts with the term ‘internet marketing’ in the title, Related Posts will put links to posts containing similar keyword phrases on the same page. What does that do? It gives him relevant links with relevant anchor text all over his site, so the interior pages of the site gain authority for that keyword.”
I don’t quite understand this. Are you saying if someone else writes a similar article it will link back to his or if he writes a similar article on a different page it will link to another article?
November 16th, 2010 at 9:01 am
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May 26th, 2011 at 10:32 pm
What an ridiculous assortment of nicely executed articles, it seems like now-a-days everyone is simply copy/pasting and stealing content on a regular basis, but I assume there’s nonetheless hope in honest blogging.
June 25th, 2011 at 6:36 am
I honestly only gave it a chance because it was at the time PR6. The site isn’t that visually appealing.
June 29th, 2011 at 10:06 am
I wrote a couple of fire safety posts before Christmas time last year