So What Does Google Use to Decide Rankings???

[Guest]

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[EGOL]

When I search from Pennsylvania that website is not in the top fifty.

So, the rankings that you are seeing are likely to be determined by personalized search or your geographic location.

[Martijn_Scheijbeler]

Hi,

Probably because it has a lot of links from 26 different domains with the anchor text: "ghetto film school" so according to Google it probably is really related to the combination of these words. However I guess it's also really a localized search term so that's probably why EGOL didn't get you within the top 50 for this site.

[Guest]

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[EGOL]

It seems to me that all the articles (http://moz.com/learn/seo/on-page-factors) written by seasoned SEO professionals are now obsolete if this website can rank so well yet doesn't even have some of what people consider important onsite SEO ranking factors in place..

That is a very interesting observation.  I have not thought of things in that way.

But, hearing your comment, I would say that the comment is absolutely correct for a query like "pizza".   The results that I see are all local pizza shops, except for one wikipedia entry.

When the query is about a product or service that is locally available then local businesses and organizations will dominate the SERPs.   A couple powerful articles might sneak in... like the wikipedia pizza article...   but they have to be on very powerful sites or very relevant sites... or sites that google can associate with the geographic location.

SEO is not obsolete because most queries are not tied to a location.  My site gets most of its traffic from queries that are not linked to a geographic location.

However, when a location is involved, it becomes important for the website to have locational information properly displayed on the site (such as address and phone in the footer) and be associated with other websites that are related to that geographic location.  These associations could be links, reviews, mentions, etc.