What’s A Google Authority Set?
Monday, February 22nd, 2010
Dr Andy Williams, the SEO expert working out of Tenerife, just published a report based on scientifically analysing the pages Google ranks for several different keywords.
You may be thinking, “how the heck can someone analyse the results for different keywords when there are usually millions of results“?
Ahh, well, here’s the thing… if you drill down through the Google results for “contact lens”, you’ll see that they stop at position 861. That’s how many useful pages Google thinks there are… the so-called, “Authority Set“. The other 29 million pages are buried in what we used to call the “supplemental index”… they’re pages with duplicate content, too few links or not enough relevance to break into the authority set.
So, Andy simply analysed pages from within that dataset of 861 and noticed something intriguing… the pages at the top almost always contained the phrase being searched for AND most of the other keywords relevant to the main phrase. Andy calls this broad coverage of the niche, “themeing” (also spelled theming).
Andy then analysed many pages for many different niches, and it became clear that better “themed” pages were more likely to be at the top of the search results. Now, intuitively, this makes sense, because experts on their topics will write well-contructed articles that naturally include all the theme words related to their topic. Logic tells us that those “best articles” will get cited by other websites and gain many natural links, which Google loves to see.
So where does this leave us? Is it the themeing which gets top rankings, or the links that expertly-written articles gain because they’re well themed?
The answer is, simply, both. You need a well themed article, and links.
BUT, here’s the kicker… if you get ghostwritten, low-quality articles for a few bucks which only repeat the main keyword a few times and don’t include many theme words, you can kiss goodbye to getting top-10 listings!
SO, check out the Google Authority Set PDF report, verify Andy’s findings and use Web Content Studio to work out the theme-keywords for your niche BEFORE writing an article. Better yet, give the list of theme-keywords to your ghostwriters and have them construct quality articles using as many of the theme-keywords as possible. Then you’re guaranteed to tick the “themed well” box, and give yourself a good chance at top-10 rankings!
