have you ever been curious on why some really bad sites rank high on Google when they are not search engine friendly. Or they don't have any backlinks. I have asked myself the same question and now I have an answer.

Below are reasons why sites rank high when they are not optimized:

1) Click through rate:

A large part of Google's algorithm incorporates click through rate. It calculates it as a percentage and depending on how many click you receive from the total number of people searching for that particular phrase you rank for.

The higher your click through rate percentage is the higher your website will show on the search engines compared to your competition. Google will slowly start moving up the search engine results page as this algorithm factor tells it that searchers prefer your website.

Click through ratings don't tell the full story because people could create deceptive title tags and meta description to increase their results. Therefore, Google also looks at bounce rate.

For example, if you look at this guide, you’ll see it ranks really high for the term “online marketing,” and the ranking very rarely fluctuates as my click-through rate according to Webmaster Tools is 31%.

Here’s another example. This post ranks well for “best times to post on social media.” It would be hard to outrank this listing as my click-through rate is currently 52%.

2) Age

Another big factor on ranking is the age of he domain. Most of the sites that rank high are at least a few weeks old.

Even if you have a brand new website with tons of backlinks, and content it still will not rank high

There is not much you can do in this situation except give it time. The older your website gets the more search traffic you will generally receive.

3) Backlinks

When it comes to backlinks Google looks a more then just quantity. They also look for relevancy and authority.

If you have a couple high quality backlinks pointing to pages that are related to your field that will boost your rankings higher then having lots of backlinks for a non-optimized site. There best sites to backlink to are ones that have .edu and .gov extensions. This is an extremely effective strategy that Google notices.

Google is able to look at the website that is linking to you and analyze the text around the link as well as the text on the page. It helps Google figure out if a link is relevant to your site and what you should rank for.

4) Cross-Linking

For people who don't know what cross-linking is, they are internal links on a website to go to other internal pages. It is important to have cross-links  not just from a navigational and breadcrumb perspective, but from an int-content perspective. If you can add internal content links throughout your site and cross-link your pages, you'll find that they have increased rankings.

On the other hand if you have to much cross-linking on your website Google will notice it and will think it is spam and rank you down for it.

5) Content Quality

The Panda Update made it so Google can determine content quality of websites. For example, it can determine whether a site is too thin or has duplicate content, allowing for a much better analysis of content quality than before.

Google does not just look at site content but they also look at the content on one website and compares it to others within the space. So if you have higher quality content than all of your competitors, you are much more likely to outrank them in the long run.

If your website does not have some of the topics talked about in this blog, Orange SEO can help. We are a customized online marketing company that can do it all and we guarantee that you will rank better on the search engines and get more customers.