I have a web page that ranks well for the term "International SEO" in Google. This page was created and optimized back in 2006. I really haven't promoted it across any social networks, I haven't asked any industry heavy weights to link to it from their (much more popular) blogs, and I've only mentioned the page or linked back to it from my own site, once in a while.

When I speak to customers on the phone, describing the use of WebPosition, I point this ranking out as one example of why some keywords are easier to rank on than others. (Trying to rank on just "SEO" would be pretty daunting.) I suspect that many of these budding SEO/SEM shops have created their own pages on the topic, trying to see if they too could rank for the term. Depending on the day and mood of Google, I've seen that there are anywhere from 300,000 competitors for this term to 1.5 million.

When you look at some of the competitors for this phrase... wow. There are some heavy weight SEO players in this area. Why are they not ranking? Hats off to sites like: www.seochat.com, www.v7n.com, webmasterworld.com, www.zunch.com, www.johnon.com, among others...

If you look solely at links... there is no way that I should rank.

First, these other sites have more links back to their main URL. Thus, overall, more popular sites than MarketPosition.com. Second, the Johnon post seems to have many more links pointing back to it's page (as evidenced by the seemingly more accurate Yahoo link check).

I've seen my page bounce around the first two pages of results over the past year. When I linked back to the 2006 post on International SEO in this February post, the ranking for my 2006 post shot to ranking 2 from hanging around rank 8-12 in December and January.

While this one example is not all conclusive, it may help to explain why rankings is about more than just "who has more links?".

-> While all engines have access to virtually the same pool of back links that point to a site, they may not count all of them. At least not publicly, through their back link reporting tools. Privately, this may be a different matter. If they do have pretty similar lists of back links, wouldn't SEOChat dominate many of these phrases with more than 553,185 back links in Yahoo? Or WebMasterWorld with 140,000 links in Google? By simply linking from their main page, they could pass a heavy load of popularity onto any page and have it rank fairly well.

-> Search engines have different tastes. This is one of the reasons why I do recommend that you create good, optimized, customer facing content pages for all engines.

->Not all links have equivalent weight. Looking at back links that point just to the pages that Google ranked for International SEO, Johnon's page would rank higher than mine, across all 3 engines.

Being that I represent the WebPosition software, which has a link checking option, do not think that I'm saying that you shouldn't check your links from time to time. It's actually pretty important. If you are out there writing on a blog, posting videos on YouTube, if you are answering questions on Yahoo Answers, if you are marketing via FaceBook, if you are using twitter, or other services to promote your self or your site, it is one measurement of how people are talking about you, promoting your site, etc. In the real world, I would compare this to checking the newspaper to see if they wrote about you in the business section when you spoke or volunteered for organizations like the Kiwanis club, the scouts, etc. Are people talking about you, your business, your web site? If they are, you are doing something right. The more people talk , the better visibility you have, and the more likely you are to rank if you have other factors going in your favor as well (content and optimization for example). It is only one in a multitude of things that you can do to better understand the overall picture of how your activities are paying off.

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