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by nerme 5824 days ago
Anecdotal evidence:

My band's website is the highest ranked page for the search term "red blue yellow".

No meta headers, no keywords, no <strong>, no <h1>... nothing, not even <html> or <body> tags. In fact, the only HTML is a <pre> tag containing ASCII art and a link to our Facebook page. I mean this quite literally, view the source.

However, it has been linked to from other sites quite frequently in recent weeks.

It would seem that Google doesn't penalize invalid HTML, or even pages that have only the most basic HTML.
2 comments
kadavy 5824 days ago
Yeah, wouldn't say they penalize, but since your site actually is at the URL of redyellowblue.com, and there are other sites (probably with some authority) linking to it, it doesn't surprise me that it would rank highly. Additionally, I doubt there is much competition for this keyphrase. It has a global monthly search volume of 1,600.
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InfinityX0 5824 days ago
I should not that there is no way in hell this has a global monthly search volume of 1,600. Google Adwords lists it at 1,600 probably, which means that the actual numbers are more like 100.

You have to remember Google is inflating these numbers for their own gain - being increased PPC spend, of course.

Who in their right mind would search for "red yellow blue"?

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detst 5824 days ago
> Who in their right mind would search for "red yellow blue"?

People searching for the band, the "primary color triad in a standard artist's color wheel"[1], or maybe an artist entering random colors because they're bored and want to see what they can find. Since I just learned about the band, I'm sure there are many other reasons that I haven't thought of.

I'm surprised it's not more. Can you substantiate your claims?

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RYB_color_model (second result)

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InfinityX0 5824 days ago
OK, you may be right. Didn't really think about that. Still, seems like a strange way to search for the RYB color model.
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ddemchuk 5824 days ago
I can't upvote this enough. ranking for red blue yellow is a trivial example on its own, but with an exact match domain, it's hard to NOT rank for it
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teej 5824 days ago
I find SEOmoz's "black box breakdown" really insightful on SEO. 4 out of 5 of their top factors are all related to inbound links. On page details factor in very little comparatively.

http://www.seomoz.org/article/search-ranking-factors

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