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Category: Competitive Research

Uncover new and exciting ways to conduct competitive analysis

  • smstv


    Hello all, I know what a Competitive Domain Analysis is, essentially, as a Developer, aspiring SEO master like Danny Dover, or Rand; LOL, I wish, those dudes a serious geniuses! I was looking for the Trifecta Tool, in SEOmoz, tools, but it seems to be gone??? So it looks like I will be using the "Competitive Domain Analysis", to assist my sales pitch. My Question is how would you explain it to a Client, or my Head Sales guy, for a pitch to a prospective career making client. Many thanks to your thoughts.

    | smstv
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  • Christoffa


    Hi. I am bran-new to the site so if I am asking a daft question I apoloise 😉 When I go to the Competitive Link Builder, enter some URLS and press GO I am taking to a blank screen with no info.  I've tried on different browsers & same issues. Any advice? Thanks.Christoffa.

    | Christoffa
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  • sofia12


    I'm doing an analysis to understand why Amazon outranks eBay sometimes. They are both big brands with alot of trust so just want to confirm my thinking and maybe gain some new insight. Amazon has more pages indexed (in Google), more internal links (pointing to homepage), and more images indexed in Google Image Search (alot more!), and of course a higher page rank.. So, question I would like to run by everyone, is are the stats basically what is responsible for Amazon's SEO success as compared to eBay? Or, is there something else I'm missing? PR:  eBay 7, Amazon 9 Pages Indexed:  eBay 106M, Amazon 875M Internal Links:  eBay 62, Amazon 261 Google Images:  eBay 150M, Amazon 4.3B

    | sofia12
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  • footballfriends


    Hi there The majority of website errors are trackback, similar to this? http://www.footballfriendsonline.com/transfer-gossip/trackback/11592555 I use the platform squarespace.com and not quiet sure how to resolve this error? Any help would be much appreciated for this seo ameuter! thanks

    | footballfriends
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  • firstconversion


    Was looking at these guys today  http://www.tentonhammer.com/ One of the orginal games websites, an authority in its niche and 7 years old (about as long as that niche has existed) Its all unique, high quality content but it has a only 220 linking domains, including BBC etc It doesnt make any sense to me that this website should have so few linking domains. Anyone have a thought as to whats going on here? S

    | firstconversion
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  • Netlogiq


    Hi, I am making the SEO reports for a travel agency  and I have the following problem. SEOmoz shows me the website is on page 1, for a keyword. Yesterday, a google search with firefox showed me the same position, while, searching from a different computer on google using firefox gave me another position. The URL shown was also different. I asked some friends to do the search - the results were the same - first page. Today, firefox shows me the second URL on the 4'th page, and the result from the first page of google does not appear, while Chrome still shows me the first URL on the first page. I have no idea why the URL that was ranking well does not appear on the first page with Firefox, and why it appears on the first page with Chrome, or why the URL that was ranking bad -meaning page 4, appears on Firefox but does not appear on Chrome. Can someone give me some advice?

    | Netlogiq
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  • gmk1567


    I am trying to find the number of back links received from a partner for different pages of the site that I am currently working on. Site has several thousand pages. Does anybody know any tool that can pull the links to entire site from a particular source? Thanks.

    | gmk1567
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  • Horrific_ending


    Having the worse time trying to figure out what keywords to use on my website. Run a E commerce site and we sell HID lighting and aftermarket Lighting or High Intensity discharge lighting. Now when thinking about why people would come to our site...the obvious reason would be to buy HID kits. BUT here is the problem, Every keyword that i throw into the seoMoz keyword difficulty tool or any other tool whether its Google or whatever comes back as super high competition for that word. Now i find low comp words but they don't really relate to my site and could kill my bounce rate percentage. Not sure what i could do or if anyone has any tips that can point me in the right directions. It sounds like i am going to have to muscle my way through this one. Any help please guys.

    | Horrific_ending
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  • JamesMio


    I'm doing some work on a client's Googe Places page, and wondered if there's any way to see what a completitors Places page is currently optimised or categorised for? Basically, we're trying to rank for 'Bathrooms Edinburgh' and almost all of the page 1 SERP's are (unsurprisingly) full of Places results, with #1 Organic slot right down at the bottom of the page.  In short - we NEED to get our Places page kicked into shape, and pronto! So, is there any way to find out how the competition's Places pages are ranking so well?  e.g. What have they categorised themselves under? Cheers in advance folks, JM

    | JamesMio
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  • kadesmith


    I've hit a road block of sorts and my mind is having trouble thinking out of the box.  I'm in a relatively small niche with a roofing product called snow guards.  I am struggling with ways to build links and content for my website at www.roofthings.com.  I've used some forums, blogs, and directories. After going through my competitors link data, it seems that one of the biggest links they have that I don't is a DMOZ listing, but that can take awhile and I have submitted about 7 months ago.  It also appears that a lot of their links I cannot get are coming from construction magazines they paid to be in.  I don't have that kind of budget at this time and so I'm trying to compete via organic rankings.  My biggest thing I am struggling with is how to gain more back links.  My biggest competitor has over 40,000 links compared to my 2700. I'm somewhat new to SEO and am just looking for a couple suggestions.  Any help will be greatly appreciated.

    | kadesmith
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  • Darioz


    I was checking Google US for some search term my company is interested for and found a thing I cannot explain well. The site Tradecarview is shown with a rating of 4.4 stars from 4209 reviews. (Please see attached image).The same rating is shown on their homepage, but I could not find much more details. (By the way: Tradecarview is a sort of directory for used car dealers to post their vehicles, something similar to Ebay or Yahoo motors.) The question is simple: is Google trusting the ratings given directly on the website? Maybe just summarizing the ratings shown here? http://www.tradecarview.com/pr/providerlist.aspx?pn=0&st=7 Or are there other sources I couldn't find that Google used to specify the rating? What do you think? Thank you in advance for your answers, Dario Pe1ft.jpg

    | Darioz
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  • Dan28


    I have a letting agency in London. So I have two clients, Landlords and tenants. Do I run different campaigns targeting each one? Thanks in advance

    | Dan28
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  • pabloandres


    Hello, My name is Pablo Lagos. We have a hosting company in Chile since 2006. All the time we have been ranked in the first page for the keyword "hosting" in google.cl. Some years ago, we used to be on the first 3 results. Since the last year our site went down to 7 and higher places no matter we do. When I run the link analysis, we have the highest punctuation in all items. I would really appreciate your comments. The site is in spanish: www.ilihost.cl Thanks.

    | pabloandres
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  • AdenBrands


    Am I missing something here or does SEO Moz only support three competitor sites to do comparisons against in each campaign? If not where do I add another website to the list to compare against? Thanks in advance!

    | AdenBrands
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  • MichaelWeisbaum


    I know what tools to use and I use all of SEOmoz's tools daily.  PA, DA, MR, & MT are all things I take into account, but sometimes all you have to do is look at a site and you can tell it's not worth it.  I'll analyze the page's backlink's and everything in between.  Are there any tricks out there that can help the decision making process?  I'm tired of trying to get links on sites that clearly are not worth it, but all of their stats say otherwise.  So do you stick with stats, or is it a judgement call? I'm particularly curious about determining the amount of possible traffic from a link. Any ideas would be greatly appreciated!

    | MichaelWeisbaum
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  • mccormackmorrison


    Hi This is obviously a well worn question (I've read the great blog by Sam Crocker last year - see below), but I'm looking for an updated set of opinions on sources of competitor data. The competitor data I'm interested in is traffic volumes either aggregated or disaggregated by referral source (i.e. organic search, PPC, email, social etc.). The types of data I've checked so far are Google Trends for websites (no disaggregation), Alexa (some good sources of free data) and Experian's Hitwise (too expensive for my current needs). In addition I'm aware that Compete will be providing an interface for such data in the UK in January at reasonable rates for what I'm after. I'm interested in views on these and other sources in relation to experience of their relative accuracy, costs, pros, con etc. Ideally I'm looking for something that is free, comprehensive, and is not being used by the competition - is that too much to ask!!! 😉 Any inputs would be greatly appeciated. Thanks in advance! Neil Sam's great blog: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/monitor-competitor-traffic

    | mccormackmorrison
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  • GerryWeitz


    The competitive analysis data I get on my blog heartspm.wordpress.com is Wordpress domain data.  That doesn't help me much.  I know Wordpress has a lot of domain authority.  Can I get comparitive information based solely on heartspm.wordpress.com?

    | GerryWeitz
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  • mlc


    hi, Local search case i try to evaluate local competition on a local query such as "hairdresser + the city name" in Google for a merchant without website neither a google adresse listing. Top results : 7 google adresses pack : ok Organic results : SERP  display only directories ! The first 10 pages are reviews platforms & local directories (qype, yelp, yellowpages etc..) except only 1 or 2 urls with personalized domains name. 1/ Would it be easy with to make a website + with a brand new domain name (myhaidresseShop.com) to dominate these serp (organics) quickly (first 2 months)  ? 2/ Would it be better to first launch a targeted submission campaign (popularity)  on those local directories with personalized data  (first month) , and later on, to build a website ? 3/ Or ideally, from start,  to make both a local campaign (Google adresse + submission) and launch a new website ? Tks in advance...

    | mlc
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  • Picoleta


    Can you complete Mozrank with tracking functionality for blogs, call to action and landing pages (forms)?. Driek Geurtsen, Oned4marketing

    | Picoleta
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  • SmartDraw


    My apologies if this noob question has already been answered somewhere, but what's the difference between the backlinks reported by Majestic SEO vs. the links reported by OSE. Just curious why the former might report 2,360 external backlinks to a page and the latter might report 949 total links to the same page. Just curious. Thanks!

    | SmartDraw
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  • mcliddy


    Hi Mozzers Just quick question When an SEO company are supplying their testimonials for example
    Keyword Search Term has 33,000 visits a month
    Keywords is in position 1 but the search volume they are showing is broad, i was always brought up to do research on exact results unless im using the reserch for a PPC campagin? Has anyone got any ideas?? should it be braod im looking at or exact?? Many Thanks Matt

    | mcliddy
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  • TRICORSystems


    So I think I might have identified an issue with a site that I'm trying to get ranked for a specific keyword but, wanted to get some opinions before I started making some big changes on the site. On my homepage I have the keyword that I would like to be ranked for in the title lets say "Blue Widgets - Company Name', also on the home page I have some descriptions of our services including the keywords. I also have a couple of the keyword based links within in the content, navigation and footer. But these keyword based links all point to another page on the site: blue-widgets.htm. If I really want my home page to rank for the keyword "Blue Widgets' should all of these links point to the home page instead of the sub page? I know there are a great number of other factors that contribute to rankings but looking at my competition, this is something that they seem to be doing. The keyword based links within the content, navigation or footer all point to the homepage.  I also have a higher Domain Authority than some of the sites that rank higher than me so I'm not sure if building more links is the answer. Of course I always want to build natural links but these sites don't seem to be doing that either. Any comments, suggestions or input would be greatly appreciated.

    | TRICORSystems
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  • doctormac


    Hi All, How do I get listed in DMOZ? I have submitted 2 times, but no luck..  Is there another way besides the site?  I have not even received a reply from them.

    | doctormac
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  • David75


    I am trying to rank for let's say the keyword "their site" , my competitor has theirsite.com, with next to no seo but are ranking #1 , my site lets say is mysite.com/their-site my site is about the same age and has a PR of 4,their site has a PR of 0 and 2 backlinks, how difficult will it be to get to number 1, am at spot # 5 in google now. Thanks David

    | David75
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  • technota


    I've been scoping out some of my competition and I noticed the number 1 ranking site is doing a lot of "interesting" stuff.  I saw a bunch of 1px blank images that they must be using for the alt tag keywords.  I also noticed several links to internal pages with different keywords without anchor text so they don't actually appear on the page.  Is this considered black hat?  Should I be doing something similar?  It feels like the work I'm doing to try to rank #1 with a clean/professional looking site are wasted when the #1 sites are doing things like this.

    | technota
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  • Pherogab


    Hi, I checked plenty of newspaper websites (example: http://www.guardian.co.uk/, http://www.nytimes.com/, http://www.lemonde.fr/) and all of them include the date in the url. (ie: http://www.nytimes.com/**2011/11/08/**business/global/italy-bonds-push-higher.html). What's the point? Google said that this has no importance and those folders are not even real, you can't get all the articles from the NYT in november 2011 if you remove the rest of the URL. If you use Schema.org properly and the google news sitemap is there still any use for this tactic?

    | Pherogab
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  • CalgaryRealtor39


    My site is ranking better than some of the competition sites even though the Moz Rank and Moz Trust are lower, anyone know why?

    | CalgaryRealtor39
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  • qubesys


    Okay, we are looking for online tools to check our backlinks, and anchor links top domains, etc. OSE is not working for us, because looks  like , it gets updated in some months. We are looking for something, which can drag the statistics in fw hours and show up. Let me know.

    | qubesys
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  • ThomasHgenhaven


    Hi Mozzers, Any of you know a way to bulk check which CMS a list of sites run on? Let's say I'd like to develop a plugin for a CMS (e.g. Wordpress or vBulletin). But that'd only make sense if some of the sites in the niche use this platform. And I'd like to avoid checking them manually with WASP. Thanks! Thomas

    | ThomasHgenhaven
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  • TheEspresseo


    ...besides the MS AdLab tool (which seems to always be down)?

    | TheEspresseo
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  • lockwoodl


    Is there some way to add more than 3 competitors to the tool to benchmark against?

    | lockwoodl
    1
  • 2comarketing


    If you search any number with "co" after it you get Continental Airlines flight information of the corresponding number. So you if you search "4co" you get the current flight details for Continental flight 4. Is there any chance if you have a company called 4CO and you own 4co.com that you could get the number one spot for that term or will google flight results always trump the "organic" results? Thanks!

    | 2comarketing
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  • TheEspresseo


    This page says "...'partial match' means that at least one word from the query matches the anchor text.". Does this mean that at least one word from the query matches at least one word from the anchor text, or that at least one word from the query matches the entire anchor text?

    | TheEspresseo
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  • TheEspresseo


    Here is what Google says about the InAnchor operator. I am curious to know if this will show results with exact match or partial match anchor text. Does anybody know?

    | TheEspresseo
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  • Greg_Gifford


    OK - so one of our customers just called us and told us an interesting story: A local SEO company called her yesterday to try to sell their services to her. She's in the process of starting SEO services with us, so she told them she wasn't interested. The sales guy told her that they were better (without even asking who she was currently using) and asked her for a term that she'd like to rank higher for. She said she'd like to rank higher for "spray in bedliners northern ky" and he said "Gotcha, call you tomorrow" He called back just now and told her to look at Google. She's now ranking number one for that term. He didn't have access to her site, so he wasn't able to change anything on her site. He won't tell her what he did, and told her it was legitimate - but it seems to me that with only off-site tactics, it'd be nearly impossible to white-hat her site to number one overnight... Any ideas what he's doing? First of all, we want to be able to tell her what he's doing, because she's curious. More importantly, we want to be sure he's not doing anything black-hat that's going to hurt our client's site. Thanks for your help, Mozzers!

    | Greg_Gifford
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  • mommybrook989


    Competitor's key search terms?

    | mommybrook989
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  • annasus


    The site I am writing about is easendtorontohomes.com I don't get it. I see that some of my competitors have more inbound links and have been around longer. Their SEOmoz trust etc is also higher. But I don't get how many could possibly be ranking higher since they're sites are all template based site via Web Tech Design and the content is duplicated from one to the other. The other weird thing is that they do everything wrong - they stuff their keywords tag, some of them use the same keywords/meta data on every single page, some of them don't even have meta tags, some of them don't even have a blog with ANY original content. Apart from listings EastEndTorontoHomes.com has TONS of original, well-researched, and keyword rich content. I just don't get it. Is it possible that google has some sort of relationship with that company? Or am I totally missing something? Some of these sites include: tinasmith.ca, mikeclarke.com, teamkassen.com

    | annasus
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  • c2g


    One of the first things I did after signing up for the 30-day seomoz trial is analyze 3 competitor's inbound links from external sites. On the Competitive Domain Analysis page, I was able to obtain links from more than half of the sites identified as their top links. All submissions were approved between 9/13 and 9/28. Now, a month later, under the Competitive Comparison section, I only have one external followed link, while the competitors have hundreds. For Top Pages, the only page that shows up is the root domain, comitzlaw.com/. For two of the competitors, 7 out of their top 10 links are from pview.findlaw.com/. I have a link from the same site, confirmed as of mid-September, yet it doesn't show up. Any ideas? I must be doing something seriously wrong.

    | c2g
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  • esendex


    Ok, so I've been doing a bit of link research and found that most of our competitors use anchor text to link to their homepage on their site and not a specific landing page. Our current strategy is to link to the correct landing page depending on the anchor to get these to rank, as opposed to getting our homepage to rank for different keywords. If that makes sense. The main reason I can think of to send all links to the homepage is that it would increase the domain authority of the site as a whole. Instead of spreading the links to certain pages depending on the anchor text. It would also give your one page a greater chance to rank for all keywords? Quick example I am a site that sells sports clothes. I have 2 main pages from my homepage: Homepage Football Rugby _Should I link to the football page for all links anchored with "football", and all linked anchored with "rugby" to the rugby page OR should I anchor all links including "rugby" and "football" to the homepage? _ What do you think is the best strategy? Thanks in advance.

    | esendex
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  • nicole.healthline


    What is the best site / tool to use to view referral traffic on a third party site?

    | nicole.healthline
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  • JasonHegarty


    I'm looking to see what sites my competitors are linked from via the open site explorer and all I see are web directories and when I visit these sites it seems they want you to part with $20 in exchange for a link. It obviously works as the sites I am researching are on page one for the keyword I am targeting. For example Site 1 Has 18,222 followed links and 1,089 no followed links Has 243 linking root domains and 17 NoFollowed linking root domains Site 2 & 3 are very similar My site is only 2 months old and has 85 followed, 10 NoFollowed and 4 linking root domains and 3 NoFollowed. My domain Authority is 15 my 3 competitors I'm tracking are between 30 and 45. In spite of this huge gulf I still rank half way up page two! I'd be really grateful if someone could explain to me what the followed links, NoFollewed links etc all means and also the opinion on getting links from web directories. Thanks for your time - Jay

    | JasonHegarty
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  • holdtheonion


    Not sure if it's OK to ask just about anything as long as it is relevant, but I would love to hear thoughts about good keywords to promote an app that will make it easy to migrate/move phone data and files - contacts, photos, music, calendars - from one phone - like a BB, iPhone or WinMo - to an Android phone or device? I'm having the darnest time coming up with phrases that people who are searching for such an app would use? Thanks

    | holdtheonion
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  • nicole.healthline


    According to Majestic SEO's glossary, a "Referring domain, also known as "ref domain", is a domain from which a backlink is pointing to a page or link." Given this definition, I'm not sure what an external backlink is?

    | nicole.healthline
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  • CompleteOffice


    The typical listing looks like this (as im sure you know): However, one of my competitors has a listing that looks like the following: (http://i.imgur.com/Io1oX.png - link to image if its too small for you to see) How do they do this? Am i right in thinking this is a lot better for SEO because effectively it takes up 3-4 positions on search results? YIHQA.png Io1oX.png Io1oX.png

    | CompleteOffice
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  • vishalkhialani


    Hi, So when building links what PA and DA do you like to follow. I was thinking of building links with anything more then a PA of 10 and da of 30 should be fine. Cheers, Vishal

    | vishalkhialani
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  • LeeMiller


    Not sure if I've got this right, but I was just playing around looking at what of the top seo guys were up to and I found this site by someone called Scott D Smith. So I open up his site in site explorer and take a look at his link profile. This guy has a bunch of .gov back links but whenever I try to see what the link is it just downloads a file and when I looked at the file it's an MS Access file. Is this right, seems like something is amiss or is this some secret seo tactic I've not heard about? lol Lee fyi - http://www.opensiteexplorer.org/links?site=www.scottdsmith.co.uk%2F Oh and also the boing links they're displaying the same behaviour too.

    | LeeMiller
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  • vishalkhialani


    Hi, I have a list of a thousand sites. I want to qualify the sites based on Pr and Da so that I can do my outreach. Pls advice how this can be done without manually putting each site in ose. Cheers, Vishal

    | vishalkhialani
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  • divan


    Hello, I've been trying to get our website on 1st place (or at least 1st page to start) on several keywords, on google in all English speaking countries. In most of them I managed, but in USA I'm on 5th page. By Domain Analysis we are better than competition. Keywords are glass nail files, crystals nail files (some long tail keywords are ok, we are somewhere on top). Website: http://www.czech-glass-nail-files.com/ We worked on code, design (notice issues is just recent, because of server migration), on-page, blog. Can someone help me out with an advise? The goal is to be #1. We definitely doing something wrong, but I can't figure out what. Thank you.

    | divan
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  • LeeMiller


    Hi, have been reading a lot about submissions to directories and posting spamming blogs and forums and how they're a bad idea, saw a great post on it by Rand in a white board Friday lecture, the only thing is I've been analysing a company and that appears to be what makes up its entire link profile, all the links point to their home page with their primary phrase as the anchor text. Just wondered how a company with some 4k links the majority being follows, hasn't been penalised for what are a really bad set of back links. Should add that this is an insurance company, they're no light weights in their industry but certainly not one of the big boys. Thanks, Lee Example here

    | LeeMiller
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  • sknott


    2 of our competitors on Google have site links show in their results which brings you to that specific page. In our listing we show up with the same results a few spots behind them with our site links visible showing very similar content, but are not actually hyper linked. Is there a way to fix the issue and let people actually be able to click on our site links instead of just reading them?

    | sknott
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