Just Noticed

[billbenson]

I run AdWords during the week, but not on weekends. To many tire kickers on weekends. I got a reasonable order - $1500 on Saturday when no ads were running. Took me by surprise. I did a search. One of my main keywords was running 2 just under the manufacturer. Today I'm 3. Amazon sneaked in on top of me today.

Goes to show you, it may take time, but you can get in there!

[cbscreative]

Congrats, bill. You have to love those kind of surprises.

[KristineS]

That's great Bill. Very cool.

[the goat]

Nice work Bill, mind if I ask how long you've been working towards it?

[billbenson]

That site, only 3 years...

I'm of the opinion, however, that when you use adwords its difficult to rank in the natural serps. If it's three now, there is no reason it shouldn't have ranked after 1 year or less. No real changes to the landing page that I can remember.

The other curious thing is its the index page and has no links to it on a G link search. I'm sure there are interior pages that are bookmarked or linked to, probably not that many though. I have just been marketing through adwords. A time filter in G's algo? I have no adwords ads linking to the index page.

Probably time to make the index page a selling page. It certainly isn't today. I certainly don't link any adwords ads to the index.

[vangogh]

First congrats on the ranking and the sale.

I think time can be a big factor in ranking. The more you're online the more Google is going to trust you. Also your links are now in place longer and the sites linking to you are older and more trusted as well.

Keep in mind Google never shows all the links they know about. It's possible the index page does have links, but Google isn't saying. Also know that a link to one page still helps your other pages assuming you're linking internally to them. One reason why it might have taken as long to rank well could also be explained by the sites linking to you having improved things on their end. Some of the links into your site could now come from authorities whereas a few months or years ago those sites might not have been as strong.

[Business Attorney]

Keep in mind Google never shows all the links they know about. It's possible the index page does have links, but Google isn't saying.

Google's link search shows few, or even no, links on several of my sites even when Google's Webmaster Tools show hundreds of links to the same sites. Yahoo Site Explorer (siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com) generally shows many more links than even Google's Webmaster Tools, though I am sure Google knows of the links.

[vangogh]

Yeah, Google likes to hold back on some information. Otherwise people like me might use the info to reverse engineer some things that they would prefer to keep secret.

[billbenson]

Interesting thing as well is the site has a lot of dup content. Its hard to rewrite descriptions for thousands of products on an ecommerces site. I have played some games to try to reduce the amount of dup content though. The indexed page isn't a dup content page and I'm always editing the site as I have time.