There are many theories on the percentage of the algorithm that relates to on-page vs off-page.
For this test, Ryan builds a quasi-real test environment to see if a low-level link can stack up against highly on-page optimized pages.
Test Downloads
Transcription Below
Can a Single Exact Match Link from a PA, DA1 Site Beat a Highly Optimized Page?
This comes from Ryan Hough. What he did was, he stacked on page factors within the serps.
What Ryan has been doing for this whole past year?
He has been a labor of love, has been building quasi real test environments and in doing, he has been slowly but surely adding one element to large sets of pages in order to create a somewhat real set up and also seeing how then maybe, what he is calling a wall, could get through or over the wall, what factors could jump you to the top.
What he did was, this first url got all of these factors – the target keyword was in the title, its got keyword density of 2.5%, the H1, the url, bold, etc. This url has all but the title, this all but the title and keyword density in the body, etc. down to the last one that has nothing.
Then, he has them submitted and is adding them as they go.
The results, with the exception of this one, all the others are ranked in order of how much optimization they had.
One oddball out there but the rest stacked in order which is unbelievable.
The point of this test though is he then took a link of DA1, PA1, the lowest level link and fired it into the page that did not have any onpage factors with the idea of, do links trump all?
Are links that much more important than onpage, that the lowest of low link will move this page and how far will it go, will it take it all the way to the top, will it beat one factor, two factors, half the factors, or what is going to happen.
In this situation, what was cool with this one link is it didn’t affect anything. It didn’t move the page that has nothing an one link stayed at the bottom and hasn’t moved in three weeks.
The onpage factors are more important than the lowest level link that you can get.
Dori: This is an incredible test. Is he going to gradually move up the power of links and maybe multiply those links?
That is the idea. The problem is that a lot of this serps become volatile quite quickly once you start throwing links at them so we will see how it goes but that is the idea, to gradually raise the links to see if we can move that bad boy up and see if three links can beat these weaker factors, we’ll see.