You have two hurdles with Google and “ranking” – you have “primacy” – i.e. ranking in the first place and then continuation. Hurdle 1 is a one off (for the most part) and hurdle 2 is a continuous part that may return to hurdle 1 (if you drop and lucky to rotate back around)
This is what we call “rotation testing” or cycling.
And because its a system, not a checklist, you can’t get a binary answer:
- Are you able to rank – do you have enough
Yes: Then not problem
No: then Content “Quality” and UX can’t help you
First Answer:
I have seen a few examples of smaller sites outranking big players for niche queries
I wanted to get to this first – because this has nothing to do with UX at the first part of indexing. Lets call it the ‘primacy’ of SEO – What can Google assess at Indexing. It cannot assess Quality of UX or Content at primacy indexing because nobody has seen it.
So how do niche sites outrank heavy “DA” domains.
Answer: This happens all the time. If you’re up against Microsoft and Bing for “Bing Search Console” – because Microsoft calls it “:Bing Webmaster tools” – you can rank for bing Search Console” by weighting on Exact Match (exactly how EMD/KID/PMD works).
I’ve done this – because Bing Search Console is like 3k searches a month.
Secondly – because we’re still being led by backlink shills – too many SEOs think of DA as a number and that DA90 has supremacy over DA50
However – this “DA” is not shared to every topic and every page. PageRank is an array. So its possible that Microsoft has a massive high score for everything they rank for – like DA(“Cloud Infrastructure”)=90. But DA(“Nike Shoes) = 00.05.
What about weighting relevancy vs authority
If Microsoft just mentions “nike shoes” in a page and rank 2nd – you can outrank them by calling your document “Nike Shoes” – and then you’re authority is X relevance (100%). whereas Microsoft’s authority is being diluted or fractioned.
Thats how low authority domains crush bigger domains – this is as old as the hills.
Logical problems in your question you cannot escape
- There is how much weight Google actually puts on user behavior versus domain authority. no content quality control in Google.
Its a CTR score. If it drops you drop. If you fix it – it’s not going to return itself. In other words, if you publish a page and it goes to number 1 and you fail CTR cycling – you’re going to drop. Rewriting the content isn’t going to automatically send it back: because Google is not a content appreciation engine. Content is a sliding scale – the same person can love a page today and hate it in 10 days. There’s no permanency. Trends, seasons, experiences, science – all change the value of content
2) “Exception UX”
This isn’t a standard, its a subjective claim. There’s no such thing. We talk about it as if its a grey scale thing – but its clearly not.
Obviously Google has no subjective preferences – because who’s will it adopt in such a multitude of scenarios?
thers argue that if the content is genuinely helpful and the UX keeps people engaged time on site and interaction signals can push a page up even without strong backlinks.
Because people dont understand authority and that clicks are authority. UX is the thing being tested, its not the source of authority.
how much weight Google actually puts on user behavior versus domain authority.
On Primacy: 0. After Ranking, CTR impact X authority. How much? This is the black box of SEO that we dont understand. Nobody can answer this.