When I heard that Google was coming out with their very own browser, I figured that as a search engine optimization specialist, I should take a look.  I don’t want to label myself an internet browser expert, but over the years I have had my ups and downs with everything from the standard IE to Firefox to even lesser used browsers like Opera and Safari. 

My Past Experiences With Browsers 

I am not here to advocate the use of one browser over another; I think that each browser has its own unique capabilities and unfortunately, limitations.  Firefox is pretty much an SEO’s dream considering all of the capabilities for add-ons and the way that the source code is displayed.  Internet Explorer has the advantage of the highest adoption in the US market and as a result, most web pages are guaranteed to display correctly in this browser, which is not the case for some of the others.  Safari had been, to date, the fastest browser I had used and the quick ability to inspect certain elements on a web page such as how long each picture took to load versus the text on the page was a big help when improving the design and conversion of a web page. 

What Does Chrome Bring to the Table? 

So where does Google’s “Chrome” fit into all of this?  Well to be blunt, it is an extremely basic web browser.  It doesn’t have the bells and whistles and add-ons that Firefox does - a major drawback to me as an SEO.  I really liked however, that all of the pictures and URL’s found in the source code were clickable.  Instead of guessing where a certain URL would take you or what a certain picture was of, all you had to do was click on the link and boom, you were there. 

The Speed Test 

The browser speed seemed to be on par with that of Safari, which as I mentioned before, was one of the fastest I had used to date.  It also appears that the security features in Chrome are among the best in the industry.  As you would expect, the default search engine with the browser is Google, but options for Yahoo! and MSN/Live search, among others, are available.  The sleekness and minimalistic style of the browser does not allow for a lot of menu options which basically keeps the focus on the web pages themselves. 

Google’s Reason for Creating a Browser 

The way I see it, right now Google is privy to all of the information that runs through their search engines, analytics and any other tracking items they have in place.  They cannot keep track of how people use the internet outside of any Google affiliated website.  With this new browser, they will be able to keep tabs on internet users’ tendencies.  This can be a good thing in some regards considering that they can vastly improve the relevancy of many of their search features.  However, it could just be one more step towards a Google monopoly. 

Final Thoughts 

Nevertheless, I was impressed with the new Chrome browser and its capabilities, although it’s still just in its beta version.  I don’t know if it will ever be able to replace the versatility and functionality of Firefox in my mind, but Chrome has its useful aspects.  At this point, it doesn’t have all of the useful aspects that I need to do my job efficiently and right now Chrome is not worth the hassle of switching browsers.

In reviewing some keywords today in Google, we stumbled upon a highly questionable website showing up in the #1 position for “business insurance“.  We check this keyword on a pretty regular basis and have slowly seen the following site creeping up over the past 2 months, but a #1 ranking is ridiculous - especially after we detail this website’s past.

You can view the results of the query for “business insurance” here or you can just check it yourself (And no, I won’t link to the site).

At the time of this writing, thecagetattoostudio.com was ranking #1 in Google for the keyword “business insurance”.  The domain has nothing to do with business or insurance as you can obviously see.

The results immediately puzzled us, especially considering that there are close to 10 million results for the keyword and it is in a highly competitive industry.  Of course, we had a few ideas in regards to how they were able to accomplish this and several of them were verified.

So how did they get this high profile ranking… let us take a look at some of the things we know:

• The domain had expired earlier this year and was purchased by an unknown owner.
  • The domain was actually used for a tattoo shop website until it expired.  The original site can still be viewed at archive.org.
• The domain has over 3,000 links reported from Yahoo Site Explorer.
  • An aggressive & questionable linking campaign was initiated almost immediately after purchase, including a lot of paid links.
  • Most of the incoming links appear to be from Russian (.ru extension domains) and appear to be of the paid variety.  The sites are entirely in Russian aside from the select few “paid links” in the sidebars.  The link to thecagetattoostudio.com are in English and utilize one of their primary keyword targets.
• The domain is also hosted on a server with 2 other domains that are similar - the topic of the website does not match with the domain name.
• The site is nothing more than an affiliate site to generate insurance leads for another site.
• The site is only made up of 2 “business insurance” related pages.  All others showing up in a “site:” search are leftover from the tattoo shop’s site.

It would appear from the outside that this is clearly a spamming attempt at Google, but you wonder if they know about it and/or if they can do anything.

So in summary, a 2-page, 3-month old, tattoo-based domain w/ a high percentage of paid links from Russian websites is ranked #1 for a super-competitive keyword in Google’s search results. 

Has anyone seen a similar situation as this?