Who Is On The First Page Of Google For New Years?

With New Years only a few days away I thought I’d take a look at who owns the coveted first page of Google for New Years. The term New Years has an exact-match location search volume of 33,100 and an exact-match global search volume of 135,000 making it a very popular search phrase. Being on the first page of Google for this term, especially over the next week means lots of traffic.

So who is reaping the rewards of this ranking? Of course some of the usual suspects are there like Wikipedia, History.com, and then two local results tailored to LA since I’m in Los Angeles – LA Times and LA Philharmonic. These are all big companies with big dominant sites that are on the first page of Google for more terms than you could throw a stick at.

Scrolling down a bit further shows a couple of the real champions. Much smaller sites that have far less SEO juice can still rank well and I was happy to see a few solid domains that include the term New Years. Two of the winners are NewYearsRace.com and NewYearsEveLA.com who both share the first page of Google with giants like Wikipedia and History.com.

As an SEO geek I like to go a step further so let’s compare the link profile for the Wikipedia entry for New Year to NewYearsRace.com to show what the little guy had to overcome. Below is the link profile for the Wikipedia’s entry for New Year.

As you can see this individual page has 977 linking root domains and 4,728 total inbound links. Not bad eh? Let’s compare this to NewYearsRace.com:

NewYearsRace.com has only 28 linking root domains and 294 total links. Even though SEOMoz shows it has a Domain Authority of 30, this is their own made up number, the real data is the number of linking root domains and the total inbound links. I’m not saying I don’t love SEOMoz, I do, but at the end of the day I care the most about the cold hard data.

28 linking root domains compared to 977 linking root domains, that’s a huge gap, but they both share the first page of Google. Sure Wikipedia outranks it but this is still a very large delta to share the same massive traffic that the first page receives. I may be biased but I’ll tell you that having the keywords in that domain is making a difference.

Feel free to do some more digging yourself for this term and see what you find. People can say that the domain has nothing to do with SEO until their blue in the face…but the data sure does show something different, and there are far more examples than this.

Now back to your regularly scheduled Friday night, which hopefully involves getting ready for an awesome New Years next week!