There is one ranking factor that you almost never see mentioned on any of the popular SEM blogs. You might see it mentioned on a forum or a blog comment, but it’s definitely a topic that isn’t discussed enough or in any amount of detail. I’m going to do what I can to shed some light on the matter. The tests that I reference are not done in a scientific way and might not be entirely accurate. My primary goal with this post is just to get you thinking about the theory that I present and to make it a larger talking point within the industry.

Anyone who has done any significant amount of keyword research knows that a lot of people use Google, Yahoo, or whatever their default search engine may be to navigate the internet instead of using the address bar as any logical person would expect. Having said that, if ten thousand people searched for “shoes.com” and 300 searched for “discount-shoes.com,” which do you think is more credible and more sought after? Now you’re getting it. Let’s play with this a little bit. What if 2,500 people searched for “shoes.com Nike”? Would “Nike” be associated with “shoes.com” and therefore any key phrase which includes the word “Nike” would be more likely to pull up the shoes.com website? I don’t know but it would certainly make sense, in my opinion.

The test that I conducted went like this. For the purposes of this post, let’s assume that I own shoes.com and shoe-info.com. I want shoes.com to rank for “Nike”. Shoe-info.com gets around 7,500 unique daily visitors to the home page. I place a few auto loading iframes on shoe-info.com. One loads the Google result pages for “shoes.com nike” and the other just for “shoes.com”. I have another two iframes loading for Yahoo with the exact same queries. So that’s 4 hidden iframes in total. I have these iframes set to be as small as possible, so no one sees them. I, of course, do not recommend doing this on any website that has any meaning to you, for obvious reasons.

So what are the results? A few months later, I rank #1 on Google AND Yahoo for the targeted term and my other rankings have increased across the board. It’s as if the search engines have suddenly trusted my domain. Of course, the term wasn’t Nike, but it was a fairly competitive, mainstream term, and during this period I did not engage in any other SEO practices, such as link building. The site wasn’t advertised offline and did not receive any significant traffic. Even the site’s architecture wasn’t optimized! I didn’t truly expect it to work, not because I doubted that queries helped rankings, but because the iframe shouldn’t send a referrer for the query. I assumed Google and Yahoo would completely discount these queries, at least for ranking purpose, due to the lack of a referrer.

The best SEOs use their common sense and then test their theories. It has always been my belief that 95% of SEO is common sense. It’s always a great idea to put yourself in the place of the search engines and to think about what data you would use to rank websites. Sure, it is possible to exploit domain queries, but it’s also possible to exploit linking methods. Google simply can’t ignore a ranking technique because it’s exploitable, so it's a good idea to never discount a theory because you think it’s exploitable or else you may find yourself behind in the search engine results.