How is Google helping Google Analytics users with site speed?

Today’s webmaster video question comes from Polyana, Sao Paulo, Brazil. Polyana asks, ‘ When analyzing rankings for highly competitive keywords in our industry, we have found sites not as optimized as ours ( on-page), and that have few links & little content are still ahead of us. What gives? Why are “unoptimized” sites ranking so well?”

Well, the thing that I want to avoid is the impression that it’s only the optimization that would make you rank. In others, there are lots of different factors that would make you rank well, but fundamentally, we try to look at on-page contents as well as off-domain links and it’s not the case that just because somebody has done optimization, it is automatically better than the site that hasn’t done optimization. There are lots of sites from schools and students and people that hand-write their html and they might not necessarily get every single thing optimized, but that doesn’t mean that it’s not a good resource. So, another thing is we typically do not show all of the back links for a site to your competitors. If you log into Google webmaster tools then we give you a very exhaustive list. But even if you go into yahoo link explorer or anywhere else, you are going to get only a subset or different sampling of the links that point to a particular competitor’s site. The reason we do that is link: originally; we did not have the storage space to return all the back links and then over time that sort of became a tradition. So there might very well be links from very high rate page ranks or very reputable sites pointing to that particular other page that’s allowing it to rank. So, you know it’s always tough whenever you are talking about it in terms of other people in your industry; we always want to look at it and say, that’s not good as a page or not as good a site as my site. But bear in mind that you can absolutely have links that you might not know about as far as two competing sites or to your own sites that your competitors might not know about, and then we try not to put so much emphasis that you have to do SEO because we want sites to be able to rank well on the basis of mirror, if they are good they should show up in search results, that’s our basic philosophy.

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