Determining why an established competitor's rankings have bombed - What's the best way to go about it?
-
I arrived at work this morning to find my weekly SEOmoz ranking report for a main competitor waiting in my inbox. 90% of the their rankings have tanked in the last day or so by an average of 3 pages - most down from page 1 or 2 where they had been sitting pretty for ages.
I'm not in a state of (total) euphoria about this because a) you should be humble enough not to gloat at your enemy's demise, and b) I need to find out what they did wrong so that I don't make the same mistake, too.
**What is your first suggested port of call to determine where my (vanquished) foe has gone wrong? How much can I find out? **
I do know one thing - with OSE I can see they've used dodgy blogging services but this, to my mind, would have been jumped upon by Google last year. No?
Thanks guys
-
Then you can exclude 3, 4, 5 and 8.
I think penalties (like malware and hacks) would not relate to only a keyword/term but rather to the entire site.
So you're down to:
-
Change in the Search Engine Ranking Algorithm
-
Loss of PageRank/Link Popularity
-
Canonicalization Problems
-
Broken links
-
**robots.txt Issues
** -
Duplicate Content
Perhaps you could exclude more of the remaining 6 reasons by using the Internet Archive: Wayback Machine. I think it easily could be used to compare present and older use of rel=canonical (3) and robots.txt changes (5).
Reason 4 can be excluded by using Xenu's link sleuth.
-
-
Thanks mate,
They dropped substantially for most of their terms except for one or two which only dropped buy one or two positions. Does that narrow down the possibilities?
-
It's probably a link purge on their part, and if you were able to see some of their linking activities and were able to identify them, that's probably a good indicator of what they did wrong, and what you should do to avoid it.
-
Hi TCE
On February 24, 2011 Google released a major update to its ranking methods popularly referred to as "Farmer" or "Panda" since the purpose was to target so-called "content farms" which are large sites filled with low-quality content. The update also targets sites that have an excessive ratio of advertising to content and sites that have a high level of duplicate or 'scraped' content. This is one of the rare circumstances in which a Google ranking factor works on a site-wide level, as opposed to an individual web page.
You could read this article by Vanessa Fox: Google Traffic Dropped With Farmer/Panda Update. It suggests ways to analyze why your rankings dropped and how to restore them. I guess this also could be used for competitors
The ten most common reasons for a site dropping rank in SERP:
-
Change in the Search Engine Ranking Algorithm
-
Loss of PageRank/Link Popularity
-
Cinderella Story or "Honeymoon" Effect
-
**Malware or Hacking
** -
Google penalty, including:
- Hidden Text
- Text Link Ads
- Thin Content
- Multiple Domain Names
- Domain Farms
- Linking to penalized, or so-called "bad neighborhood" sites
- Excessive Link Exchanges
-
Canonicalization Problems
-
Broken links
-
Server Problems
-
**robots.txt Issues
** -
Duplicate Content
I know these are not direct answers to your question. But my guess is that the Farmer/Panda update caused it or an error in their server at the time of indexing...
But it is almost impossible to identify, without tracking all their moves over time and at the time when the rankdrop happend ...
-
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
-
Site Ranking for keywords that they haven't targeted in content
There is a site that I am constantly battling for the #1 spot for a particular keyword and I can't see that they are doing any link building, they are not using any anchor text for the keyword "at all" just their company name (not exact match) and their content doesn't even contain the keyword. I used Open site explorer to analyze their activity, but they are doing something I can't figure out from that data. Any other tools to use? I have higher quality links than them, post content nearly 5 times per week to my blog and their blog hasn't been updated in ages, I kill them in social media, there isn't one instance that they are better than my site and I only build quality driven links, no blog comment crap and get featured on lots of industry blogs for our work. I distribute my content very effectively, I just can't figure it out. They were no where about 5 months ago now they are tearing it up for lots of keywords in the industry top spots. I can build a few links and surpass them, but I have to do it every week or so and I think they are doing something fishy. I just want to figure out what they are doing and bury them. I don't want to post their url and mine here as I don't want them to see this post in search results.
Competitive Research | | photoseo10 -
Why do keyword competition rankings differ between Google and SeoMoz?
I am a novice at keyword ranking etc. so I appreciate your patience! I checked a longtail keyword - how do i get out of this relationship - in Google AdWords and it came back 'low competition.' When I entered it in SeoMoz it came back as 'very competitive.' Any thoughts? I appreciate your help.
Competitive Research | | UncleTodd0 -
What is a desirable range for a keyword's difficulty rating?
Hi all! I am new to the world of SEO and just getting started. As I am doing keyword research I am consistently finding difficulty ratings in the 40%-50% range. Is this considered a "par" rating or should I be looking for "a longer tail" rating? Thanks
Competitive Research | | jclayton180 -
Keyword - Competition between competitors
So, I'm about 2-3 weeks into my subscription and see a renewal coming. I love the information I'm getting - but I really want to maximize my capabilities with these tools. Any article/blogs or forum post suggestions that I should read would be awesome, right now I'm still in that phase where i see lots of cool things - but have no idea to fully use them to really give me that even bigger boost. My First Question is - There are some keywords, that I climb and sometimes slip. But overall a competitor and i flip flop between 15-22 range for it. What would be a good way for me to really add that extra push to throw me down into the top ten and leave them in the dust?.. Also on the Keyword topic - There are a lot of keywords they probably rank for that I don't, what is the best way to go about identifying keywords they may targeting/have a good presence in that I'm not aware of. I do have a site that is on multiple newspapers, and .gov sites. Among other things... This has already proven to be very good for me. But I'm 99% sure I have a few/lot of leaks, that if they were plugged - We would see a lot of good things come from those results.
Competitive Research | | choiceenergy0 -
Static Html Pages V/s Wordpress - For open content pages?
Hi there. I am worried a bit about static html pages or wordpress as an instance to write down open page content for our website. We are a product based website - primarily Saas based product. But with time we have seen that if we write more content people will be able to find us better,. Earlier our blog resided on blog.example.com now we are moving it to example.com/blog/ Issues - I really want to know that I need to generate lots of fresh content so I am using wordpress as the blog medium and content generation medium too. Basically the wordpress instance will be a content generated pages. I can also have static html page based content but then our content writers will always have to take the help of develoeprs to publish it to our sites. Whats the best way to go about this keeping SEO really crucial in mind? Thanks for your time and help!
Competitive Research | | shanky10 -
Is there a way to do a reverse keyword search?
I want to enter a domain name and see what keywords that domain is ranked at. Is it possible to do this with Moz?
Competitive Research | | scoutzie0 -
Google Page Rank not working?
My Google PR in the toolbar has not worked since last night? Is it on my end or is anyone else have the same issue??
Competitive Research | | Robbie82990 -
How can I add more than 3 competitors
Is there some way to add more than 3 competitors to the tool to benchmark against?
Competitive Research | | lockwoodl1