Why does someone's FB page rank so highly?

[KempRugeLawGroup]

Hi Everyone,

i recently ran a non-personalized search and saw that this facebook page https://www.facebook.com/tampapersonalinjurylawyers ranked very highly for both "personal injury attorney" and "tampa personal injury attorney." The page has very few likes, and they don't even post that often. From my limited  knowledge, that leaves me guessing it's because its a quasi-exact match facebook page, but that can't be right...can it?

(Ranking screenshot is attached)

Thanks,

Ruben

GO4N11x

[iSTORM-New-Media]

I would a keyword difficulty analysis on that keyword and check the scores of the other pages ranking there. Remember that the root domain authority still holds a ton of value in rankings (facebook's being 100). And you're right, it's also grabbing some exact match text in the h2, url and body.

[DennisSeymour]

Hi Ruben

For one, he built a lot of links to it

http://www.reflectivepractice.ca/program.htm

http://www.mymakhzenandme.com/the-director.html

http://www.sourceabc.com/alpha/T/

http://theislandpartypei.ca/news.html

http://www.besthotpick.com/alpha/T/

all from sites he probably controls.

If you are going to ask why it's not penalised, that's another long story which is probably already answered here in the QA area somewhere.

[KempRugeLawGroup]

Hey Dennis,

What did you use to find those links? I ran it through OSE, and I got nothing.

Thanks,

Ruben

[KempRugeLawGroup]

Actually, I just ran it through the free version of seo majestic and found a bunch. So, I guess I should be using more than one backlink checker from now on!

Thanks guys,

Ruben

[SapientSEO]

This, in my opinion, is the BIGGEST flaw with Google's algorithm right now. In order to beat back spam, Google gives heavy preference to high authority domains. That's why you see the SERPs dominated by brands right now. If you Google "brown boots", you'll notice each of the top results has little to NO links pointing to that page, but a HUGE overall domain authority.

SEOs are taking advantage of this loophole right now. Because properties like Facebook, Yelp, YouTube, SlideShare, etc have so much trust and equity built up with Google, you can spam the HELL out of them and not get penalized. And even if you do get penalized, it's really no skin off your back because it's just a social profile. No one was finding it through Google before so it doesn't matter if they can't find it in the future.

I rank a ton of YouTube videos and SlideShare documents with really crappy gigs on Fiverr. Low quality social bookmarks, cheap web 2.0s and old school spam link wheels work really well. All the garbage is essentially filtered out by the high authority of the domain.

P.S. You can't find the links with OSE because the link index is only updated once a month, and even at that, OSE's link indexer is pretty sub par.

This response was written by Ryan Stewart.