Search Clarity

I woke up Monday morning to an unexpectedly sudden result: two url’s have already been cached, indexed and ranked for “search clarity”.

(Update: by Wednesday, a third URL was indexed: enter the main searchclarity.com domain, which effectively replaced the SearchClarity.com Launch Notes post as the most relevant listing on this domain.)

Less than one week after launching searchclarity.com, without adding a single hypertext link from an external site, a single blog post has popped up in the Google SERP for “search clarity”:

Poking around using a few different forensic searches, we found some typical variations:

• For variations on exact match queries (the launch blog post ranks top for “search clarity” vs. search clarity, where the blog post appears at #3),
• For site: searches with and without the “www” (canonical hostname issues have not yet been resolved on the site, and the site:searchclarity.com search shows a second listing for the contact page, where site:www.searchclarity.com only shows the single blog post.)

We haven’t reached our goal yet of grabbing top ranking for the “search clarity” query w/o quotation marks; but the most interesting thing to note is that it was indexed and ranked at all. There are no external links pointing to this domain, and very few signals to identify this site as worth getting listed in the first place. I frequently point out to clients that submitting a brand new site or page to search engines isn’t necessary; in fact, without the benefit of an inbound link from a trusted site, even submitting won’t be of any help anymore. But typically, a site that is built on a solid foundation of SEO best practices, and even just some light online promotion and link building, will usually be enough to get brand new site listed, and even ranked for a non-competitive query phrase. But this time, we’re looking at a site that got indexed and ranked, without a single inbound link. So what gives?

Sorry, more on that later; I’m off on vacation for the next week. Off to float down the Rogue River in Oregon.

Want to watch the results with me?
If you’ve stumbled onto this site and want to be kept abreast of watching a new site’s evolution, just subscribe to the watch-list using the contact form here. (Just thought of this, so haven’t had time to create a specific form for this yet. Just leave a note that you want to keep abreast of how this domain is doing in the engines, or leave a comment below. I’ll dive back into this when I get back home in a week.)

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