Continued from first page How Content Mills Beat Google.
The most well-known Google ranking signal is the number of incoming web links pointing at a webpage. A webpage with 500 incoming links is considered “better” than one with 20 incoming links. While those other ranking signals may have some impact where pages have link counts within a few hundred of each other, the fact is that a webpage with 5,000 links will rank higher than one with 50 links regardless of how many of the other ranking signals suggest the lesser linked site should rank higher.
The only other question to be answered is what each webpage should rank for. That question is answered for Google by a webpage’s title tag.
Google’s search algorithm does a basic pattern text matching against the title tag of each webpage in the index. The closest matches are put through the ranking algorithm and scored to determine the top results. The next closest matches are then ranked against each other and so on.
Unfortunately, the pattern matching that Google does is pretty rudimentary. When a user enters a search query like quiet hamster wheels Google’s ranking algorithm starts by finding the exact matches, then looks for those that match some of the words in order, then ones that match all of the words (not in order), then ones that match some of the words and so on. The more exacting the match, the higher the relevancy of the page. There is some overlap, especially when there are not enough very close matches to rank, but for the most part, the closer a webpage matches the query exactly, the higher it will rank.
The content mills churn out not one article on quiet hamster wheels, like any legitimate pet information website would do, but rather they publish numerous articles with variations on the title. When a user searches in a way that closely matches the title tag of the high quality article it likely will rank higher thanks to legitimate diversified links from other websites. However, when a user searches using slightly different phrasing, the high-value article from the pet information website is up against a webpage with a more similar name. Google considers that lower quality page to be more “relevant” and therefore ranks it higher even though it has nothing but the supposedly lower-worth backlinks from the same website.
Make Money Writing Online Using Content Mill Tactics
If you want to make money writing online with your own websites, then you need to learn from the content mills tactics, if for no other reason than to keep them from beating you.
Always link your own content. Those links might not be as valuable as offsite links, but they do count for something. Link your highest value webpages a lot. Link everything else at least a little.
Always pay attention to your title tags. If your analytics start showing that people are finding your webpage by searching for a keyword or key phrase that differs more than a little from your title tag, change the title tag to fit better before someone beats you to it. Even better, write another webpage with an exact fit title tag with useful (if re-phrased) information from the original and then link to both. If things go your way, you can rank highly for both variations, just like the content mills do.