By James BurfieldSEO consultant · figures recorded 24 August 2026A site with almost no authority is doing 879 clicks and 43,700 impressions a month. It got there in five months, and no single page is carrying it.
The interesting part is why.
The growth
Monthly organic clicks, Google Search Console. August is partial, to the 23rd. The trailing 28 day figure is 879.
What it is
Motocross Mecca is a record of the sport. Every championship, every rider, every result back to 1952. The database holds 8,861 riders and 724 circuits.
The part that makes it different is the rating system.
The ELO system
Motocross has never had an agreed answer to “who was the greatest”. Different eras, different classes, different continents, no way to compare them.
So the site borrowed the method chess uses.
The rating is explained on the page itself, with the scale published rather than hidden.
Every rider starts at 1500, the same as a new chess player. Every race gets scored head to head between every pair of finishers, using the same ELO algorithm FIDE uses for grandmasters. Beat someone rated above you and your rating moves further than if you beat someone below you.
Races are weighted by tier. A win at MXGP against world champions counts for more than a win at junior level. And every result is processed in order, so a rating updates after each moto rather than at the end of a season.
225 riders rated across 6,091 races, from 1952 to 2026.
That produces something no other motocross site has: a defensible answer to an argument fans have been having for forty years.
What a page actually looks like
A rider page. Titles, wins, seasons and the rating, rather than a paragraph of copy around a photo.
These are the pages doing the work. They rank because they answer a specific question completely, and because almost nobody else has bothered to build them.
The numbers
| Month | Clicks | Impressions | Avg position |
|---|---|---|---|
| April 2026 | 60 | 3,230 | 10.7 |
| May | 350 | 23,095 | 10.4 |
| June | 496 | 25,040 | 11.9 |
| July | 509 | 28,867 | 13.0 |
| 28 days to 23 August | 879 | 43,700 | 12.0 |
Why it works
Three things, and the third is the one worth stealing.
The query space is undefended. Nobody is competing for “Martin Garcia motocross” or “MX2 2003 final standings”. Those pages sit at positions 1.6 to 7 because there’s nothing else to rank. Compare that to a page targeting “best motocross bike”, where a DR 5 site has no chance at all.
The rating system generates pages that answer something. A rider page gives you a position in a ranked history, with the maths behind it. That’s a real answer to a real question, and it’s why the pages hold position rather than bouncing.
No single page carries it. Of roughly 1,000 pages earning clicks, it takes 107 of them to reach half the total. The biggest, the champions index, contributes 75 clicks. That’s a wide base rather than one lucky hit, which is what a structured site looks like when the structure is doing the work.
One thing worth knowing about your tools
Ahrefs estimated this site at 13 organic visits in August. Search Console recorded 680 clicks in the same month.
That’s a 50x error. Third-party tools estimate from a keyword index that barely covers a new site in a niche sport. If you judge a young site on third-party numbers you’ll conclude it’s dead when it isn’t.
Search Console wins every disagreement.
What this has not proved
It hasn’t proved the model earns anything meaningful. The site carries advertising, and no revenue figure is being claimed here.
It hasn’t proved the growth holds. Five months is short, and average position drifted from 10.7 to 12.0 while traffic grew, which usually means the site is ranking for a wider set of weaker queries rather than climbing on the ones it had.
And it hasn’t been tested by a core update yet.
What happens next
The rating system gets extended, and the site keeps publishing. The measures worth watching are whether position holds as the page count grows, and whether the site earns any links on its own once enough people use the rankings to settle arguments.
I’ll publish that either way.