Quad Cities Bowling - KW Test

Hello. I've noticed that people on this forum tend to obfuscate keywords, spelling them wrong on purpose or replacing letters with symbols.

They seem to be concerned about their post coming up before their site in the SERPs. That certainly seems plausible, so I decided to test it out myself.

"Quad Cities Bowling" is a generic phrase that nobody is targeting. None of the GG results (I checked the first couple pages) have all three words together. Not even a bowling alley.

In a few days I'll search for the KW. Next week I'll report back with my results. Have a nice day!

- Mike T.

This just appeared on page two of Google. Not the post itself, but the forum (Search Engine Strategies > Search Engine Optimization) rather than the post. (The post title was being picked up.)

- Mike T.

This post just appeared #1 on Google. Wow, I'm convinced now.

EDIT: I'll add Quad City Bowling and see how long it takes to show up.

- Mike T.

Quad:

My site is well optimized for a not extemely competitive keyword phrase. We have a PR5 and 100-200 bls. We put up a variation on our keywords that is dramatically less important and got to number 1 in google quickly. The forums aren't the only places where this is done. On the other hand if you don't want the forum to outrank your keywords, be careful.

In a similar vein, for a variation on our main phrase, there are two directories that are ranked higher than us. Also across the boards for a wide variety of phrases there are some generic sites (massive directories, sites like Amazon, etc.) that have high rankings for all sorts of phrases. No real page optimization, just mention of the phrase on an internal page and a kazillion back links into the home page.

Dave

UPDATE: This page has dropper to number two.