Seasonal links, seasonal ranks
-
As the garden season begins to wane I notice yet again how my ranking for some garden specific terms - eg ' garden tealight holders' start to rise again.Since I am doing nothing much I can only assume that my competitors have moved their focus to more winter based merchandise.
Does anyone have a good understanding of how some websites are able to acheive high rankings during peak season only?
I am assuming they are buying advertising (with the follow) for say 3 months before the season peak and manipulating internal linking to direct link juice from one section of the website to the other.
Is this strategy risky. Has Google ever made mention of this issue?
-
mmmm - maybe but I suspect there is paid linking and deliberate sculpting going on - Garden Beet is more active on social forums relating to gardens than one of its main competitiors
however in support of your argument I recently witnessed Garden Beet shoot from the dark unseen ranks of 54 to number 8/9 following a tv campagin on a related term - but yawn yawn - the page is now hovering around 20 -
-
My guess would be social sharing volume could be playing a huge role, and this could especially be true in the last few years. Tests by Rand and SEOmoz have shown that sized quantities of tweets or facebook shares, especially very rapidly have had significant effects on ranking.
Also, I don't dispute the fact that people probably are buying links, but I would also think there may be a bit of natural back linking happening, in the news sites (high authority), blogs, etc surrounding the on-season.
-Dan
-
best get sculpting I suppose
lol.... yes, I better get busy
-
thanks EGOL - well best get sculpting I suppose
-
I see some of my competitors starting to pop-up in the rankings for Christmas merchandise. I think that they are buying links. I think that this is a risky strategy, but as you see, it can be effective.
A few years ago, internal links and anchor text were extremely powerful for moving different parts of a site in and out of the SERPs with each arriving season. However, the ability of a webmaster to do that with his own site has greatly diminished - at least that is the effect that I see on my own sites. I don't think that this is a risky strategy, but its not as effective as it was a few years ago.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Re: Inbound Links. Whether it's HTTP or HTTPS, does it still go towards the same inbound link count?
Re: Inbound Links. If another website links to my website, does it make a difference to my inbound link count if they use http or https? Basically, my site http://mysite.com redirects to https://mysite.com, so if another website uses the link http://mysite.com, will https://mysite.com still benefit from the inbound links count? I'm unsure if I should reach out to all my inbound links to tell them to use my https URL instead...which would be rather time consuming so just checking http and https counts all the same. Thanks.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | premieresales0 -
Is a link inside a video player considered an inbound link from the domain the player is embedded in?
Good afternoon...We just added a link to our homepage inside the menu of our video player. In the link below, if you click on the menu icon in the bottom right corner of the video player, you'll see a "Powered by WellcomeMat" link at the bottom of the menu. http://www.wellcomemat.com/video/kt216e25172416n/-Rancho-Santa-Fe/Ca/92067/16596-Via-Lago-Azul/1234567890/ My question for the community is would that link be considered an inbound link from any site that has the video player embedded? So hypothetically, the video player is embedded into www.abcd.com. If a user would click on that link and go to our homepage, would search engines recognize that as an inbound link from abcd.com, even though it sits within our video player? And most of the time, the player sits within an iframe. So that's why I'm not 100% sure. Thanks for reading and for your help! It's much appreciated!!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | brian7201 -
Google Rankings Are Dancing What To Do?
I was been ranking on page no.3 for many of my keywords. Suddenly they all dropped to Page No.9& Page no.10. Now 10 days back one of my keyword got back to page no.4 & now suddenly today it went back to page no.9 again. I haven't done any changes to the site. My page speed is less than 4secs. Checked everything & all seems fine. No errors or manual actions notification in Webmaster too. Should i wait for the rankings dance to get over or should i start doing something. Currently i am planning to get fresh pages with good content added to the website for the whole month of July. Suggest me what to do?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | welcomecure0 -
Trouble ranking
I have a site that got messed over pretty hard by a BigCommerce issue. They used to rank but then Big Commerce had a glitch that set every page on the site to a https which was auto set, by their system, to not be indexed. This caused the entire site to go missing. It was then fixed by me, only to have the same glitch happen again. I again fixed it, and BigCommerce released a patch to resolve the issue. They admitted blame to my client and said it can take a while to resolve. It has been a few months now, and google is slowly recrawling the site. It has about half the pages indexed. The pages that are indexed do not rank at all. I was wondering if you guys see any major flags that would cause this or if it is still related to the big commerce glitch. link
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Atomicx0 -
Do 404 Pages from Broken Links Still Pass Link Equity?
Hi everyone, I've searched the Q&A section, and also Google, for about the past hour and couldn't find a clear answer on this. When inbound links point to a page that no longer exists, thus producing a 404 Error Page, is link equity/domain authority lost? We are migrating a large eCommerce website and have hundreds of pages with little to no traffic that have legacy 301 redirects pointing to their URLs. I'm trying to decide how necessary it is to keep these redirects. I'm not concerned about the page authority of the pages with little traffic...I'm concerned about overall domain authority of the site since that certainly plays a role in how the site ranks overall in Google (especially pages with no links pointing to them...perfect example is Amazon...thousands of pages with no external links that rank #1 in Google for their product name). Anyone have a clear answer? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | M_D_Golden_Peak0 -
Link from archived article.
A strong news site has an "archived.domainname" folder, where they have older articles listed. I can get a link on a page where there is a 4 year old article, which will be in this archived sub-domain. My questions: Will Google view a link from a 4 year old article as less valuable. Will Google notice the article is 4 years old and find it odd why the page all of a sudden has a link to my site, and thus devalue such link the sub-domain "archived" does that tell Google it is old and a link will be less valuable thank you
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | knielsen0 -
The missing link?
Hello and Welcome Moz friends! Thanks for taking the time to look at my problem. On my website I've optimized our content to match the keywords I have selected for the site. I constantly am Re-writing articles, reading SEOMoz on tips and tricks how to make link juice flow. Yet only one of my keywords ranks decently, the rest never show up. I have the hardest time getting traffic to my site, and sales after that. Maybe I am implementing something incorrectly or there is something I am not doing. www.FrontlineMobility.com If you have any tips or anything to give me I would gladly accept it, any criticism is also appreciated. Thank you Friends, hopefully you can help me.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | FrontlineMobility0 -
Too many links!
Hi, I'm running a wordpress blog (modhop.com) and am getting the "too many links" on almost all of my pages. It appears that in addition to basic site navigation I have plug-ins that create invisible links that are counted in the crawl...at least that's my guess. Is there a good way to control this in wordpress? A nofollow in the .htaccess? A plug-in that does this? (I'm sort of at novice-plus level here so the simplest solution is ideal.) Thanks! Jake modhop.com
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | modhop0