Around the turning corner of year 2007, there was a site about Chinese culture on top 3, sometimes top 6, in the target keyword phrase ‘new year’. (I made this keyword up as an example. If you check on Google, you wouldn’t find this site because I don’t want my client exposed. Indeed, it was a similar keyword.) Around February 2007, all the sudden the site became top 1 in this keyword although there was no change in the content or the link profile. That’s because February is the Chinese Lunar New Year, people are very interested in my client’s content, so they click in and stay there for long time in reading the content. Google is very concern of the click-in rate. What Google would concern are: Would searchers immediately click ‘back’ button after click into this site? How long does the searcher stay in the site and start another search? Would the searchers click on the links attached in this site after? Will the searchers immediately redirected to another site? Google has all the data and want the best experience for their searchers. After the February 2007, the Chinese fever was over, the site went down to its number 3 as before. We can learn from this experience that searchers experience can make a big different. They can get you form number 3 to number 1. If you are trying to push your client’s site to number one in certain keywords you would probably have content that makes readers to stay long. They will vote for you.

As Google trust old website more much more than a new website, old and trustable site usually rank very well. You will notice in the search results that sub-pages of an old site without any inbound links from other site can easily rank in top 10 search result for moderate competitive keyword phrases. Someone have done an experiment like this:

He put the same content on a home page of a one-year old website (let’s call it Website A) and also on a sub-page of a ten-year old website (let’s call it Website B). The contents are very similar. To avoid duplicate content penalty he fixed the text a little bit, so search engines don’t look at them as duplicated content. A month later, when he check back to the result, he found that the sub-page of Website B rank number 10 on the targeted keyword while the Website A rank number 24. The sub-page of Website B has only a few inbound links from its own pages, not even from the home page, with no inbound links from other websites while Website A has hundreds of inbound links from different sites. See the different?

The question comes to how to take advantage of this experiment result? The answer is easy. You may buy an old domain from auction sites or rent a page from them.