Rule of Three
Posted By Eli On June 20, 2006 @ 8:25 pm In General Articles | 50 Comments
I’ve been getting a common question emailed to me several times lately that I thought I’d address real fast just to clear it up and get it out of the way.
“My site is ranking well in ____ and ___ but doesn’t seem to rank at all in ______. What’s wrong why won’t _____ rank me well?”
Feel free to fill in the blanks with either Yahoo, MSN, or Google.
The common answer to this questions in forums such as [1] WebProWorld is that “Don’t worry about it _____ is just a wierd engine, there is really nothing you can do or good answer of why they aren’t ranking you well. I would focus on gaining some relevant links to your site, that might help.”
Thats an acceptable answer and it covers all the bases, however the person asking the question usually walks away disappointed and unfilled. I think the good answer is a little bit more simple than that. The answer is to make sure your inbound linking campaign follows the Rule of Three.
Obviously your site has content that is found acceptable for high rankings in the other two engines, so I would stray from reworking all your content and onsite optimization, because it is obviously close to success in all three. However don’t keep onsite optimization far from your mind. Keep in mind that SE’s such as Google, Yahoo, and MSN value inbound links differently. It is common belief in the White Hat SEO world that one single quality inbound link has the power to boost your rankings in all the major search engines. What one engine may consider the “one link to rule them all” another may not.
Lets look at an example:
[2] www.go-magazine.ru. This site got indexed and recieved a PR7 by the next google update with only 3 links at the current time. It also ranks very highly for many many moscow related terms. By all definition this is a perfect example of having one inbound link propelling you to the top.
My point is simple. The three engines each treated this site differently when it first came out. Google for example may have said, “wow nice inbound link. I like you.” Lets give that link a voting power of 1,000 points to the go-magazine site. Yahoo as an example may have seen the same link and said, “wow nice inbound link. I like you.” and gave the inbound link a voting power of 700 points. It’s not that Yahoo liked the inbound link any less, it just didn’t determine it’s value to be as high as Google said it was. Thats just the reality of three different engines having three different opinions on the same subject. Putting this example into context, this is probably what is happening to Joe Schmoes website in the third engine that he thinks is frowning on him. Multiply this effect by several hundred or thousand links the differences become quite large among the three engines.
Stick to the rule of three.
If possible attempt to create for yourself three websites. One that by focus does well in Google, one that’s designed to do well in Yahoo, and a third for MSN. You don’t have to build these sites to amazing feats like your original site, but at least have them there and put each site’s focus to one doing well, or as I like to say Gained Approval, from one single engine. Many authority sites create multiple sister sites on multiple domains. Some even prefer using subdomains such as About.com. If each site gains enough notary in it’s focused engine to boost the value of it’s link enough to propel any site it links to and you point it to your parent site, your parent site naturally will do well in that engine, because it got an inbound link that is valued highly by that engine.
Creating 3 sister sites isn’t practical for me?
That’s fine, the same rule still applies you just have to figure out how to follow it. Look at the inbound links of the sites that are outranking you in the prodigal engine. Compare them in a detailed manner. One or many of those inbound links may be the difference between your ranking and their ranking. All you have to do is attempt to get links from the same sites that link to them. You can see how this would have the same essential effect as creating sister sites. A good tool for this is [3] PR Prowler.
In short my answer to the question is to get inbound links that the other search engine likes. If your ranking well in Yahoo and Google, but can’t rank well in MSN. Gain some inbound links that you know MSN in particular will like.
I hope this clears it up a bit for a few of you 
50 Comments To "Rule of Three"
#1 Comment By BlackBerry On June 21, 2006 @ 8:04 am
Hello,
I really liked your article and was wondering how do we approach other sites linking to our competitors? what do I need to do to convince them to link to us? and do you usually sepend money on other sites linking to urs?
thanks
BlackBerry Deals @ [4] www.airtimemanager.co.uk
#2 Comment By Eli On June 22, 2006 @ 5:19 am
Hi Blackberry,
Thanks for the compliment. I would suggest you read the article on PR Prowler as mentioned in the post. Another trick that works surprisingly well is [5] Blue Hat Technique #5. The other option of course would be to check to see if they have recipricol link scripts on their sites, or to contact them each personally. If they are willing to link to your competitors they are likely to link to you as well.
#3 Comment By Keywords On June 28, 2006 @ 6:31 am
Suggest that when looking at the potential inbound link targets you also consider which are most relevant to your topic area and prioritise link acquisition in that order.
Some of the sites may be linking to your competitors but not allocating benefit as they are off topic whereas the on topic links may be creating the majority of the benefit.
#4 Comment By neil strauss On January 22, 2008 @ 6:02 am
My site ranks well in google, but it does not rank well in the other two, yahoo and live. I have no idea why it does not rank well. Also all the information about seo seems to be for google and not the othe two!
#5 Comment By Last Minute Beach Vacations On January 22, 2008 @ 2:49 pm
Personally I find MSN to be terrible. All I ever find when when looking for long tail keywords is sponsored links, splogs and adult content. It should be easy except the whole first page almost is paid links. But the rest is usually cloaked spamy garbage.
#6 Comment By scs networks central ltd On June 7, 2008 @ 12:01 pm
Just learning about seo and without paying a fortune, which you can quite easily get conned with. Just found your site and have read some of your articles which are very interesting. I thought seo was a mine field at first but I am determined to crack it. I have managed to get found in Google, but still learning about the other sites. However, we haven’t managed to get a page rank yet. How long does this take? Any advice to give me? thanks alot.
#7 Comment By julie On August 30, 2008 @ 4:11 am
Hey Eli can you please tell me any simple method to build links??
I have read much of your articles..
My fav article is : converting website content in to video and .exe file…
Those posts are really excellent eli..
#8 Comment By Keerti On September 14, 2008 @ 4:08 am
Hey Eli.. I completely agree with you..
Its a cycle process..
Pr completely depends on Linkbuilding -> Content ..
Without quality content we cannot get any links..
I am not boosting ELi.. i havent seen such a content like urs..
And you are only one who is getting link from wikipedia..
Hands up to you..
thank you..
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#10 Comment By |earn Online On January 4, 2009 @ 4:07 pm
Awesome thread, you’ve given me a few things to do.
#11 Comment By SEO Nottingham On July 28, 2009 @ 7:44 am
Very interesting method. Would you link the 3 sites to each other or would they be totaly independant of each other?
#12 Comment By Sameday payday On October 9, 2009 @ 4:30 am
Lots of live describe that you are really the blog writer.
#13 Comment By Web Oracle On July 1, 2010 @ 3:23 pm
I’m always hearing seo experts that those three search engines have the same metric in ranking a site. If Google does this the others will follow.
Thanks to this post it cleared out my confusion.
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Oh thats what a proxy is
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#16 Comment By Moonstone On January 11, 2011 @ 11:17 pm
Interesting looking back at this now… I’m finding that the correlation between serps seems to be closer than it used to be. I’ve a site that’s #3 in Yahoo, Bing and Goog - with the top 2 being wikipedia pages in all cases. Yahoo and Bing in particular seem to serve very similar results - and the closer to the top you are, the more similar the positions. All this stuff gives great clues as to what to focus on imo, if you look hard enough and examine enough serps to see the patterns…
Seems that Yahoo places a higher score on keywords in the domain name - the site of mine in question ranked in Yahoo and Bing quite easily and took much more work to get there in Goog.
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Article printed from Blue Hat SEO-Advanced SEO Tactics: http://www.BlueHatSEO.com
URL to article: http://www.BlueHatSEO.com/rule-of-three/
URLs in this post:
[1] WebProWorld: http://www.WebProWorld.com
[2] www.go-magazine.ru: http://www.go-magazine.ru
[3] PR Prowler: http://www.bluehatseo.com/seo-tools-review-of-pr-prowler/
[4] www.airtimemanager.co.uk: http://www.airtimemanager.co.uk
[5] Blue Hat Technique #5: http://www.bluehatseo.com/bluehatseo-technique-5-get-a-link-from-all-of-your-competitors/
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